Melting Pot? No, Just Melting

March 2, 2016 – 8:49 pm

You’ve heard all about Donald Trump’s shocking notion to secure our borders, I’m sure. Have you heard about the recent chicanery by the Justice Department regarding voter-ID laws in four American states?

In brief, here’s what happened: the good people of Kansas, Georgia, Arizona, and Alabama, exercising their states’ right under the Constitution, decided to require that voters show ID. The Election Assistance Commission, which is a Federal agency that certifies voting systems, agreed to let them do so. This caused so irritated various leftist organizations that they filed a lawsuit in Federal court seeking an injunction against the EAC, in order to prevent the states from imposing this requirement.

So on one side, we have an array of left-wing activists, seeking to expand their franchise to include anyone who can show up at a polling booth. On the other hand, we have the DOJ, whose job it is to defend the government when it is sued.

But when the DOJ lawyers showed up in court, they immediately filed a pleading that agreed with the plaintiffs, and consented to the injunction they sought.

Think about how sneaky that is. If the EAC had simply refused to allow the states to require ID, they’d have had a fight on their hands, one that would probably have gone all the way to the Supreme Court. (And with one of the solicitors being Kansas’s Kris Kobach, they’d have had a real scrap on their hands.) But by playing it this way, they turned the lawsuit around, and then all they had to do was to show up and cave in. Their little rope-a-dope didn’t work, though, thanks to Judge Richard J. Leon (may he live long and prosper), who gave them the spanking they so richly deserved. Read the rest of the story here, and a follow-up here.

Meanwhile, here in New York City (where, under current management you’ll soon be singing this in the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium), voters soon won’t even have to pretend to be American citizens. More about that, here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (9)

Don Ho, Call Your Office

March 2, 2016 – 7:58 pm

Here is something I had not heard about until today: it appears that water infused with tiny bubbles (and I mean really tiny, with diameters near the wavelength of visible light), has many useful properties. My first glimpse of this was here. I’m curious to learn more.

Here’s a remarkable statement (my emphasis):

Some studies have shown that fish raised in an environment with fine bubbles more than double the weight and size of fish in a control environment.

Crikey! It’s getting hard to keep up.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

The Marshmallow Test

February 29, 2016 – 1:45 pm

In a 2013 post, Culture and Metaculture, I quoted a lengthy passage from the late Leszek Kolakowski’s Modernity on Endless Trial, in which he explains the way radical multiculturalism causes what I will call a kind of historical “stenosis”. As more cultures are added to the mix, all of which must be given equal weight, the area of “overlap” — the foundation of possible commonality in the new metaculture — becomes smaller and smaller. Because culture is heritage, the effect is that history is “tied off”, like a newborn’s umbilicus. (I’ve touched on this often, for example in my post Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration.)

In Culture And Metaculture I wrote:

What remains of the high culture of the West in our new, barbarian metaculture is shrunken, withered, pecked by crows. As for the metaculture itself: what are its pillars? Where are its heroes, its mythos, its religion, its language, its great literature? Where are the commonalities that bind its people together? Gone, gone, gone.

Worse: where is its history? Not only gone, but despised. Our new “culture” has lost its sense of extension in time. Under modernity’s ascendant doctrine, the long history of the West is only a litany of sins, deserving not propagation, but repudiation. We have no legacy, no heritage, to cherish for posterity; we have pulled up our own roots. If our new American “culture” has any history worth remembering at all, it is no more than a few decades old, and consists almost entirely of the destruction of the past.

In our “brave new world”, then, we are cut off from both past and future, imprisoned in the present as no generation of people has ever been before. We have lost — jettisoned — both our rudder and our compass, and are unmoored and adrift.

In short, we have lost our sense of extension in time. Until now, every generation of every civilization saw itself as a living bridge between past and future — as heirs and beneficiaries of the productive labor of their forebears, and stewards of that treasure for children yet unborn. But now, having pulled up our roots (and salted the earth from which they sprang), we have no inheritance to cherish and preserve; that which we have not simply squandered, we have taught ourselves to despise. We have, therefore, nothing to offer our posterity, and so if we think of it at all, it is only to turn away in guilt, and to focus on what we can take for ourselves right now. If that weren’t enough, we also find ourselves in a time of exponential social and technological change. Even those of us who do seek to preserve our inheritance can hardly imagine how.

It’s often been said that civilization is, at bottom, the organization of “low time preference”: the deferral of present consumption to take advantage of the increase of the relative value of future goods. But in order for that strategy to work, one has to be confident in a stable future. When things change too rapidly, and we can no longer be sure that our efforts today stand a reasonable chance of bearing fruit in later years, it drives time preference toward the present. And that, in turn, undermines the very foundation upon which civilization is erected.

So when a civilization becomes unstable, or when the pace of change becomes too rapid, there is a cascading time-preference effect, a kind of negative-feedback loop that begins to take hold.

All of these things, then, work together: multiculturalism, through a process of historical “stenosis”, severs the past; this loss of heritage, in turn, diminishes a society’s sense of obligation to its ancestors, and stewardship for its descendants; rapid technological and social change diminishes the surety of the future. All of this drives time-preference toward the present — which manifests itself in hedonism, present consumption, loss of social cohesion (why pull together when there’s nothing to pull for?), and declining birth-rates. Finally, the foreshortening of time-preference attacks the bedrock of civilization itself, in an accelerating, destructive cycle.

It is the daunting task of the new Right to break this cycle, somehow.

By Malcolm | Posted in Pretty Good Posts, Reaction | Comments (16)

Is Wisdom Obsolete?

February 28, 2016 – 10:29 pm

Our previous post argued that because the world is now changing faster than it ever has, with even the pace of change itself accelerating sharply, any conservative or reactionary ideology that seeks simply to roll back the clock is doomed to fail. What I said was that any hope for an effective New Right depended on whether it could draw for this “brave new world” a blueprint for a living, organic system, built on sufficient wisdom about the permanent features and variations of human nature as to be capable of effective adaptation to a rapidly changing environment.

In the comment-thread, our ex-pat e-pal Horace Jeffery Hodges (you should be reading his excellent blog) asked:

Wisdom is insight gained through reflection on experience, and it worked well as a guide to dealing with a future that would be similar to the past, but the future we face threatens to be radically unlike the past, so what role remains to wisdom?

It’s a stimulating question, and I am interested to hear what our readers have to say about it. I’ll get the ball rolling.

I agree with Jeffery that wisdom is insight gained through reflection on experience. I’ll say also that, like anything of value, it has to be paid for; a life composed entirely of luck and ease may be a pleasant road to travel, but without suffering (intentional suffering will do just as well as the aleatoric kind, if chance won’t steepen your path), you haven’t paid the toll.

There’s an old saw about a student and his teacher:

“Master, what is wisdom?”

“Good judgment.”

“But how do we learn good judgment?”

“Bad judgment.”

But is wisdom nothing more than “a guide to a future that would be similar to the past”? It is that, of course, but I think it is much more than that; above all I think wisdom is knowledge of what it is to be human. Real wisdom, and the sort of wisdom we are going to need in these unpredictable times — when the only thing we can be sure of is explosive change — will be the ability to see what we must hold onto, and what we can let go of, in order to shape the future of human societies so as to let us live in harmony with the permanent features of our nature. Many people, for example Edmund Burke, Chesterton, and Hayek, have reminded us that our traditions condense and preserve a storehouse of knowledge and experience vaster than any mind can hold. (I’ve commented on this often myself, for example here.) But Jeffery is right; much of that experience was of a world very different from the one we will soon inhabit.

What makes this explosive transformation so unsettling is that our technology is changing faster than we are. We cannot know what this new world will be, but we are, willy-nilly, going to have to live in it. We must hope at least that we know ourselves.

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

What Next?

February 27, 2016 – 11:47 pm

Conservatives, and especially reactionaries, are often criticized as grumpy old geezers, yearning for a bygone world that is never coming back, and that was never, in fact, nearly as nice as they’d like to think it was.

This is a fair point. It’s only older folks who have the perspective to see what’s really changed, and what’s really been lost — and of course the world changes irreversibly, every day. Some changes, such as improvements in medical technique, or the recent proliferation of excellent breweries in America, are uncontroversially changes for the better. (Those were the only two I could come up with off the top of my head, but I admit my list is probably not exhaustive.) Others, however, really are a matter of perspective, involving complex trade-offs with long-term consequences that are still evolving. Others things are obviously much, much worse now than they used to be.

One thing is for sure, though, just as Omar the Tentmaker warned us so long ago:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
”ƒMoves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit,
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
”ƒNor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Not only has the world changed irreversibly, it is going to change at an almost unimaginably faster pace in the next few decades.

Peter Diamandis of Singularity University has begun a series of posts about what’s coming up next. He lists eight powerful technologies, all of which are advancing at an exponential pace. They are:

1. Computation

2. Internet of Things (Sensors & Networks)

3. Robotics/Drones

4. Artificial Intelligence

5. 3D Printing

6. Materials Science

7. Virtual/Augmented Reality

8. Synthetic Biology

It’s easy to see that rapid advancement in any of these might have enormous social and economic effects, but they are all accelerating — and what’s more, advances in many of these fields immediately spur faster progress in the others. It’s very clear that, as much as things have changed in the last few decades, we ain’t seen nothing yet. (You can read Mr. Diamandis’s first two posts in this series here and here. I don’t know whether they will gladden or horrify you; I suppose that depends, for example, on whether the adjective “disruptive” puts you in a positive state of mind.)

Let’s face facts: the only way out of this mess is forward. (Or, as Churchill said, “When you’re going through Hell, keep going!”) So what’s the proper task of the Right, in these choppy and uncharted waters?

Here’s what it isn’t: getting behind this or that candidate in the next election. That’s like choosing which side of the barrel you’re going to sit on as you go over the Falls.

Here’s what it is, in three parts:

1) Understanding what happened. How did we get here, and why? How did the great promise of the Enlightenment, and of the Framing, bring us to this point? What can we learn from the way this experiment in popular government — which was, in 1787, a radical and previously untested inversion of the near-universal tradition of monarchy — has worked out? Looking back over the span of 230 years, what principles of government can we say were tested and failed? What principles were abandoned that we ought to have stuck to? What are the “system requirements” for such a program of ideas to run without crashing? Where were they met, and where were they not? We have faced a great many problems in the history of this experiment, and tried to solve them in many different ways. Which solutions worked? Which didn’t? Why? Finally, and these are perhaps the most important questions of all: How do we define “success”? What is the purpose of government? What is a happy society? How do we define human flourishing, especially given that different cultures and ways of living, rather than simply falling from the sky onto whatever human population happens to be passing underneath, are the specific, phenotypic expressions of particular peoples?

2) If we have managed to answer the many questions in part 1 — and while some of them have obvious answers, some are very hard — then we should see taking shape a set of general principles worthy of preservation and adaptation for the future. What can we discard? What, on the other hand, can we identify as being essential for our flourishing? Which principles were specific only to a particular time, or to a particular state of technological capacity? Which are universal enough to be adapted successfully to a world transformed by the extraordinary new powers that we are soon to possess — in particular, the power to alter the human genome?

3) Finally, we need to do our best to keep abreast of the pace of technological change, and to try to anticipate the ways in which it will change the context of human life. In particular, we will need to understand how it will distort the pressures and incentives that shape the channels in which human history flows.

Only when we have done all of this very difficult work — and it may well beyond our best efforts — can we work wisely and effectively to create a truly relevant and responsive Right, one that has any hope of restoring an organic and livable culture for our children. There is no doubt, as Peter Diamandis says, that “disruption” is ahead; my own feeling is that much of it is going to be profoundly unpleasant. But going backward is not an option; nor is trying to graft, in mechanical and simplistic ways, the vanished past onto a radically different future. “Disruption” may turn out to be an opportunity to rebuild some things of forgotten value in brand-new ways.

All of this is very grandiose, and very vague; I am really just thinking out loud (which is what blogs are so helpful for). The point I’m really trying to make here is that much of what we think of as the Right in the modern West is, for the most part, really nothing of the sort; it is either just the caboose of a fast train heading Left, or it is a kind of doomed and static nostalgia. What it is not, as far as I can tell, is a living, organic system, built on sufficient wisdom about the permanent features and variations of human nature as to be capable of effective adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. It must become this, or it will die. And much that is of incalculable value for human happiness will die with it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (33)

Music of the Spheres

February 26, 2016 – 3:26 pm

Recently we noted a major scientific event: the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO experiment.

The other day, the physicist and cosmologist Brian Greene visited Stephen Colbert (yes, I’m linking to Stephen Colbert) to give an explanation and demonstration of the experiment. Watch it here.

The big payoff: the actual “sound” of two black holes colliding. Wait for it!

h/t: my boy Nick.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (18)

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

February 25, 2016 – 12:26 am

I had occasion today to pay a visit to one of the websites on our sidebar: The Fallacy Files. It’s one-stop shopping for examples of logical fallacies; I hadn’t visited for a while, and I’m glad to see it’s still in business. Even more comprehensive than our political comment-threads, I think.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (5)

Another Post About Physics

February 24, 2016 – 12:45 am

The results are still coming in as I write, but it seems Donald Trump has scored another crushing victory, this time in Nevada. It is becoming increasingly apparent that his campaign is, if anything, gaining momentum, and that he will likely be the one to take the field against whichever champion the Democrats put up in November. He may very well win.

From a quick survey of Twitter, it seems this is causing a good deal of concern over on the Democratic side of things. I’ve just read a lot of incredulous remarks about fascism, racism, bigotry, Hitler, how-could-such-a-thing-actually-be-happening-in-America, and so on. (As far as I can gather, the general idea seems to be that we are nothing more than a “proposition nation of immigrants”, or something like that, and so none of this makes any sense at all.)

Come on, people. This is all as lawful, and predictable, as the sunrise. Don’t they teach you anything in school anymore? Bueller? Bueller?

Pull a great and immensely heavy pendulum as far and as high as you can, as fast as you can. (Maybe you can even get some of your Republican friends to help.) Pull and pull and pull it, until your grip fails.

This is what happens next. Duh.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (14)

Forward!

February 22, 2016 – 10:33 pm

I want to thank everybody once again who emailed me in response to my previous post, and to all who commented. I had begun to have very serious doubts about whether I was really doing anything useful or helpful here, or just shouting up a drainpipe, and the many responses I received were enormously encouraging. Although I hate to single anyone out, the very first comment — a link to this essay by Albert Jay Nock — affected me deeply, and I thank the commenter (whose name refers to a strange and creepy idea known as “Roko’s Basilisk“) very much for posting it.

I do want to make some changes, though. I’ll still pound away, perhaps a little less exclusively, about political, social, and related issues. I will try to make the tone a little less polemic, though, which will mostly mean pruning some normative adjectives. (I certainly won’t shy away from, for example, pointing out that various extremely powerful parties have deep antipathies to American or Western traditions, that others are running what amounts to an international criminal syndicate masquerading as a charitable foundation, or that so-and-so is in fact a person of doubtful character, and so on — but I will try to rant a little less and explain a little more.)

I also intend to adjust the balance of topics so as to pay more attention to the things I used to write about, and new things besides. Yes, our civilization is still on a runaway train to the edge of a very nasty cliff, but the scenery is still attractive, and it is worth trying to enjoy the ride just a bit more.

The comment-policy needs improving. I realize threads can wander off-topic, though I will ask commenters to try not to; what I really need to eliminate, though, are insulting comments that do nothing to advance the discussion at hand. I am going to delete those. (I am not innocent of this myself, especially lately, and have been pretty short-tempered at times too, so I share this burden.) What I don’t want to have, on political or related threads, and will no longer allow, is mere name-calling and poo-flinging.

In order to have any productive discussion at all, however, there must be sufficient common ground. People with incommensurable axioms, or who use words to mean entirely different things, or whose disdain for the Other Side is so visceral as to make them think in purely moralistic (or as I see it, crypto-religious) terms about opposing views, simply cannot engage productively, and when I see that happening I’m going to shut it down, because it’s a waste of our time. In particular, it is a waste of my time to respond at tedious length to thousand-word comments based on a system of beliefs with which my own worldview, my own set of axioms, has little or no congruence. (An example of such incompatibility lies at the very heart of most “conservative/liberal” differences; it is, as a great many observers have explained, a difference about the malleability and the limits of human nature.) Often such comments pose — and often convincingly so to sympathetic or less-astute readers — as litanies of “facts”, but “facts” require context, and often require a great deal of unpacking before they reveal underlying assumptions, methodological vaguenesses, selection biases, and other hidden variables and liabilities. Facts are nothing without theories to connect them.

In short, if I am writing about political or social matters, I am doing so from my own viewpoint, which is, for the most part, traditionally conservative (or, perhaps more accurately, “reactionary”). I am skeptical about many things that most people, especially what I sometimes call “goodthinkful” people, hold as axioms. These include such intensely polarized topics as: so-called “social justice”; the relative values of various political systems and political enfranchisements; human biological variation; what to do about climate change; the value of tradition and traditional roles; the differences between the sexes; the value of hierarchies; and, I’m sure, many others that I don’t need to enumerate here. If the very fact that I would question any of the “progress” we have made in these areas irritates you, or strikes you as a sign of moral weakness, then you don’t belong here, and I’m going to tell you so. I will tell you also that my aim in examining all of this — even if you find it hard to believe — is simply to understand what makes for happy, harmonious, safe, fecund and prosperous societies. (Furthermore, I will add that the solution to that problem, in my opinion, varies a great deal for different human populations, and that a naive universalism about this is at the root of many of the woes of the modern world. If that irritates you, or strikes you as a sign of moral weakness, then you probably don’t belong here either, and I’m telling you so now. Stick around only if you think I might persuade you — and I ask you to be honest with yourself about that.)

That’s really all I have to say about all of this. I’ll probably excerpt some of what I’ve written above and stick it to the main page someplace.

Again I must thank all of you, as always, for reading this blog. It’s been nearly eleven years now, and this is post number four thousand forty-seven. I hope to keep at it for many years to come.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (29)

What am I doing here?

February 19, 2016 – 6:24 pm

Our commenter ‘Musey’, in response to our previous post about Special Relativity, wrote from Australia to tell me her husband Martin said I’d “explained that very well”.

Readers, if you look at my early archives you’ll see that I used to explain a lot of things in here that had nothing at all to do with political matters. I’m now so very deeply sick of writing and arguing about politics and decline — sick of picking unwinnable fights, preaching to the choir, alienating old friends, changing nobody’s mind about anything, and all the while making myself socially radioactive, that I might just go back, at least mostly, to other things.

Yes, as far as politics and society are concerned I do believe, as I explained to a commenter recently, that I see a great division widening in America; that our current course is unsustainable; that the traditional American nation, which generations fought and died for, is tottering, under continuous assault from within; that if we look to Europe we see a foreshadowing of what may well happen here; that it is hard for me to see how the deepening fissures dividing our nation can ever be bridged; that the original “operating system’ installed at the nation’s founding is increasingly incompatible with the “hardware’ it must run on today; that the nation is too vast and too diverse for a centralized government to manage it effectively; that there is a boiling anger in much of America that threatens to tear the nation to pieces; that human biodiversity is both real and vitally important to understanding both history and human societies, and that a great civilizational crisis will soon occur in the West, and in fact is already underway. I believe also that democracy itself has dangerous, perhaps inevitably fatal, liabilities, and that those liabilities are sharply increased by high heterogeneity and universal suffrage. I believe that the West has been committing voluntary suicide through mass Third-World immigration (particularly mass Muslim immigration, which is the fastest path to social and cultural self-extinction that any Western nation can follow.)

But I’ve said all this, by now, many times over. What has any of it accomplished? As far as I can see, absolutely nothing at all. So why bang on about it? It’s not like I don’t have other interests — and the late days of a great civilization, at least the part prior to violent collapse, can actually be rather a pleasant, crepuscular interval, for those with the means to enjoy it.

I really have to think this over.

(For examples of what this blog used to be like, you might have a look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

See also our linked series on free will, beginning here, and on the mind-body problem, beginning here. There’s lots more, but you get the idea.)

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (28)

How To Explain Special Relativity To Anyone Of Normal Intelligence In Ten Minutes

February 19, 2016 – 12:25 am

What we will explain is why, for objects moving uniformly in a straight line, time runs slower. We’ll use no mathematical symbols, and won’t even need any pictures!

OK, here goes:

Before we begin, you have to accept two facts. The first is that if you are in uniform motion, all the laws of physics appear exactly the same as if you were standing still. Think about it: if you are in a smoothly moving airplane, you can pour coffee into a cup, etc., just as if you were sitting on the runway. In short: if you are in a windowless box, unless you are accelerating, going around a curve (which is the same thing), etc., you can’t tell if you’re moving or standing still. Agreed? This is called the Principle of Relativity. The first person to point it out (that we know of) was Galileo.

The second fact is that the speed of light through space is constant, for all observers. This is just a curious fact of the world, but it’s been shown to be true. If I’m standing still, and a beam of light whizzes past me, and you take off after it at a million miles an hour, we are still both going to measure the speed of the receding beam at about 186,282 miles per second — a value known as c. I won’t belabor this part — but, for example, if the speed of light weren’t constant, then light coming toward Earth from a faraway planet when it’s moving toward us in its orbit would travel toward us faster than light shining from the planet when it’s moving away, and we’d see everything all out of sync. For that not to be true, there’d have to be some medium (like air for sound waves) that held the velocity constant. But we know there isn’t, thanks to the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887. Everybody, no matter how they are moving, always sees light moving at the same speed. That’s just the way it is.

The rest is really easy.

Imagine a special kind of clock. It consists of a mirror on the floor, a mirror on the ceiling, and a pulse of light that bounces endlessly back and forth between them. Call the time this takes one “tick”. Because the speed of light is constant, the length of the ticks are always exactly the same.

Now imagine mounting one of these in a railway car. Let’s also put a very accurate conventional clock on the wall of the car. They should run nicely in sync, because, after all, they are both very accurate clocks.

Now set the train in motion, whizzing by as you stand on the platform. (We’ll give the railway car a glass wall, so we can see in.) The train runs very smoothly and steadily. Inside the train is an observer (let’s call him Al) with his back to the window. The train runs so smoothly, he can’t even tell for sure if he’s moving at all.

For Al, each tick of the clock takes a constant time, which is the height of the car (i.e., the distance between the mirrors), divided by the speed of light.

But things are different for you, standing on the platform, watching the train go by. By the time the light travels the height of the car, the bottom mirror has moved down the track a little way (along with the rest of the train). And by the time it bounces back to the ceiling, the train has moved the same distance, again. This means that, as far as you are concerned, the light didn’t go straight up and down, but made a sort of zigzag down the track, which is a longer path. (To be specific, the length of each bounce is the hypotenuse of a right triangle that has the height of the car as one leg, and the distance traveled by the train as the other.)

Are we clear about this so far? Can you picture it?

What this means, then — because as far as you can see, the distance traveled by the light is longer on the moving train, and because the speed of light is always constant — is that each tick of the clock, as seen by you on the platform, takes longer than it does as seen by Al on the train. (Remember that Al doesn’t even know if he’s really moving or not, and so for him the light just seems to be bouncing straight up and down.) And if you think that this is just some jiggery-pokery involving weird light-clocks designed just to give this effect, remember that if the light-clock were to get out of sync with the wall clock, Al would notice, and would therefore be able to tell he was moving! But we already know he can’t possibly be able to tell in any way whether he’s moving or not, thanks to the Principle of Relativity.

So there it is: since time is what clocks measure, and since clocks tick slower on a moving train, then time runs slower on a moving train! Simple, right?

If you want to figure out just how much slower, it’s easy; it’s all just a bunch of right triangles, and a little algebra. You can do it. (Maybe I’ll do it for you in another post, but it’s really not hard at all.)

Last thing: that train gets shorter, too. If you want to understand that, just turn the clock so it’s lined up lengthwise down the train. I’ll leave that one to you.

So: want to have some fun? Teach a little kid how Special Relativity works. You’ll both feel great.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (25)

Thomas Sowell Endorses Ted Cruz

February 17, 2016 – 8:48 pm

His column begins:

Amid the petty bickering, loud rhetoric and sordid attack ads in this year’s primary election campaigns, the death of a giant — Justice Antonin Scalia — suddenly overshadows all of that.

The vacancy created on the Supreme Court makes painfully clear the huge stakes involved when we choose a President of the United States, just one of whose many powers is the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court.

Read the rest here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

And Now For Something Completely Different

February 16, 2016 – 8:35 pm

Time to look away, for a moment, from the gloomy downhill parade of current events. Instead, here’s a look at one of the most difficult systems of Chinese martial arts, as performed by Grandmaster Chan Sau Chung. (The quality of the video is poor, but the quality of the kung fu is exquisite.)

I have to say — it’s a little difficult for me to watch this five weeks after knee replacement!

P.S. This site is a rich source of vintage videos, particularly of master performances of the system I’ve studied for 40 years, Hung Ga (a.k.a. Hung Gar, Hung Kuen, Hung Kyun). Here, for example, is our long-staff form, as performed by Wu Waan Fei in 1949.

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts | Comments (5)

On The Confirmation Of Justices

February 15, 2016 – 5:37 pm

Jonah Goldberg (with whom I agree about some things and not about others, as I do with pretty much everyone else on whatever we might very broadly call “the Right”) has posted some thoughtful remarks about the death of Antonin Scalia. You can read them here.

This in particular stood out:

The division of blame for the ugliness of these fights is not equal. Yes, there’s hypocrisy on all sides of the aisle as the tables spin around and around. But philosophically this is a world liberals created. They have invested in the courts’ having power the Framers never intended. Their doctrine of the living Constitution has given, in theory, an open-ended warrant for courts to do whatever they want. People lament the rush of money into politics, but that money is made necessary by a government that has evermore control over the economy and peoples’ lives. Similarly, when we turned justices into monarchs, we increased the incentives for people to care much more than they should. If Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution held sway in the land, the Court and the government would have much less power over our lives. And that, more than anything else, explains why the Left hated him so much.

In his post Mr. Goldberg mentions Chuck Schumer’s July 2007 call (that is, 18 months before the next president would be due to take office) for the Senate to refuse to confirm any of George W. Bush’s remaining judicial nominees. Mr. Schumer had this to say (video here):

… I will recommend to my colleagues that we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances. They must prove by actions not words that they are in the mainstream rather than we have to prove that they are not…

This is just a prologue considering the constitutional harm and dramatic departures that are in store if those few are joined by one more ideological ally. We have to, in my judgment, stick by the precepts that I’ve elaborated. I will do everything in my power to prevent one more ideological ally from joining Roberts and Alito on the court.

Here’s Barack Obama in 2006, as he prepared to join, for purely ideological reasons, a filibuster against the confirmation of Samuel Alito:

As we all know, there’s been a lot of discussion in the country about how the Senate should approach this confirmation process. There are some who believe that the President, having won the election, should have the complete authority to appoint his nominee, and the Senate should only examine whether or not the Justice is intellectually capable and an all-around nice guy. That once you get beyond intellect and personal character, there should be no further question whether the judge should be confirmed.

I disagree with this view. I believe firmly that the Constitution calls for the Senate to advise and consent. I believe that it calls for meaningful advice and consent that includes an examination of a judge’s philosophy, ideology, and record. And when I examine the philosophy, ideology, and record of Samuel Alito, I’m deeply troubled. I have no doubt that Judge Alito has the training and qualifications necessary to serve. He’s an intelligent man and an accomplished jurist. And there’s no indication he’s not a man of great character. But when you look at his record ”“ when it comes to his understanding of the Constitution, I have found that in almost every case, he consistently sides on behalf of the powerful against the powerless; on behalf of a strong government or corporation against upholding American’s individual rights.

Remember, also, the vile campaign the Left waged against Robert Bork, one of the most extravagantly qualified SCOTUS nominees ever to sit for confirmation.

So please let’s not hear any more tendentious claptrap about constitutional “responsibilities” or “obligations” to consider lame-duck appointments at a time of ideological war. The old norms have fallen away completely now in America — as anyone who watched the passage of Obamacare ought to know — and all that’s left is the struggle for power, and a mortal contest between competing visions of the American nation, and of civilization itself.

Well fine, then. Bring it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (17)

The Rump Court

February 13, 2016 – 11:49 pm

What does Antonin Scalia’s death mean for the action of the Court? In the broadest terms, there are four scenarios; three of which are unaffected, at least in purely numerical terms:

The Supreme Court reviews lower-court decisions. Let us call decisions that would be upheld by conservative justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and, generally speaking, Roberts) ‘R’ decisions, and those that would be upheld by liberal justices (Breyer, Kagan, Sotomayor, Ginsburg) ‘L’ decisions. The swing vote is, as always, Anthony Kennedy (who in recent years has been, de facto, his own branch of government).

— For an ‘R’ lower-court decision in which Kennedy joins the liberal bloc, the ruling will be reversed. This outcome is unchanged by Justice Scalia’s death; the ruling will simply be reversed now by a larger margin.

— For an ‘L’ decision where Kennedy joins the liberal justices, the lower-court decision will stand. This is also unchanged by Mr. Scalia’s death.

— For an ‘R’ decision where Kennedy joins the conservative justices, a ruling that would have been upheld will be left unchanged, because lower-court rulings cannot be overturned by an evenly divided Court. Again, this outcome is the same as it would have been were Justice Scalia still alive.

— For an ‘L’ decision where Kennedy joins the conservatives, however, a ruling that would have been reversed will be allowed to stand. I am not sure, offhand, how many pending cases this is likely to apply to, but it’s going to be painful to watch it happen.

None of this takes into account, of course, Justice Scalia’s ability to persuade his fellow justices, in particular Mr. Kennedy.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (57)

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 Reaction, Politics | 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 Society and Culture, Religion | 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 Society and Culture, Reaction | 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)