Time Out

February 23, 2013 – 10:37 pm

I’ve written and deleted three posts already today, and am just going to lay off for a day or two. I’m cranky and fed up, and have a toothache besides, and nothing interesting, good or useful will come of writing under such circumstances. Back in a bit.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Feh!

February 22, 2013 – 11:40 pm

Writing at NRO, Jonah Goldberg comments on the sky-is-falling hysteria surrounding the impending “sequester” — which, were you just to listen to the news or to White House Press releases, you’d never imagine would still leave the federal government spending more money than last year.

Mr. Goldberg observes:

Obama wants more tax hikes and thinks he can convince the country to accept them if the choice is between what he calls reasonable revenue increases and catastrophic cuts that will let people die in the streets, leave children to go hungry and illiterate, and allow poisoned food to sit rancid on supermarket shelves.

And he’s not crazy for it. This strategy has worked time and time again. If an agency has a billion-dollar budget and someone proposes cutting a dollar from its scheduled increase in funding, that dollar will be the one earmarked for the screw needed to keep a bridge from collapsing on a grade school’s Thanksgiving parade.

It’s hard to capture in words the immorality of what we’ve done to generations yet unborn. Our childrens’ children will spit on our graves when they look at our criminal stewardship of the great nation they ought to have inherited, and find themselves stuck instead with the bill we’ve run up in their names to pay for our hedonism, our greed, and our selfish, childish belief that the world owes us a living. We’re no better than junkies who will do anything, no matter how fraudulent or felonious, just to keep the next fix coming.

I can’t, in general, blame our politicians for this, on either side of the aisle; they’re just doing what politicians do, and they couldn’t keep doing it in the way they are if we didn’t want them to. This lardaceous, otiose gundyguts, this indolent, Falstaffian swillbelly of a nation is simply what America has let itself become.

You can read the rest of Mr. Goldberg’s essay here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments Off on Feh!

Something Fishy

February 22, 2013 – 2:36 pm

The world’s tuna fishery is collapsing, with prime specimens selling for seven-digit prices. Yet tuna is everywhere, from supermarket shelves to delis to sushi bars, and the retail cost remains low. How is this possible?

According to this item, a majority of the “tuna” being sold in the U.S. isn’t tuna at all. A lot of it is a fish called “escolar”, the eating of which, we learn, has some seriously unpleasant side effects.

Proceed at your own risk.

By Malcolm | Posted in Food | Comments (8)

A King Out Of Water

February 21, 2013 – 11:47 pm

Mencius Moldbug comments on the approaching death of Lawrence Auster, here.

Auster himself is puzzled, and I think his puzzlement illustrates rather well exactly the points Moldbug makes about him: Auster’s specialty is order and clarity, while Moldbug’s piece, as always, is long, discursive, and sesquipedalian.

But I thought it was quite a nice tribute, myself.

I’m really going to miss VFR.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Slow Road To Extinction

February 21, 2013 – 3:29 pm

Over at Mangan’s, our friend Dennis links to a post by Bruce Charlton about the cratering birthrates of the developed, Westernized world. That there is something maladaptive about secular modernity has been apparent for some time, and I’ve written about this myself; most of the discussion to date, however, has focused on social and cultural influences, with particular emphasis on religion.

Unsurprisingly, the penetrating intellect of Alexis de Tocqueville descried this hazard of secularism two centuries ago. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote:

Religions give men a general habit of conducting themselves with a view to futurity: in this respect they are not less useful to happiness in this life than to felicity hereafter; and this is one of their chief political characteristics.

But in proportion as the light of faith grows dim, the range of man’s sight is circumscribed, as if the end and aim of human actions appeared every day to be more within his reach. When men have once allowed themselves to think no more of what is to befall them after life, they readily lapse into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity, which is but too conformable to some propensities of mankind. As soon as they have lost the habit of placing their chief hopes upon remote events, they naturally seek to gratify without delay their smallest desires; and no sooner do they despair of living forever, than they are disposed to act as if they were to exist but for a single day. In sceptical ages it is always therefore to be feared that men may perpetually give way to their daily casual desires; and that, wholly renouncing whatever cannot be acquired without protracted effort, they may establish nothing great, permanent, and calm.

If the social condition of a people, under these circumstances, becomes democratic, the danger which I here point out is thereby increased. When everyone is constantly striving to change his position – when an immense field for competition is thrown open to all – when wealth is amassed or dissipated in the shortest possible space of time amidst the turmoil of democracy, visions of sudden and easy fortunes – of great possessions easily won and lost – of chance, under all its forms – haunt the mind. The instability of society itself fosters the natural instability of man’s desires. In the midst of these perpetual fluctuations of his lot, the present grows upon his mind, until it conceals futurity from his sight, and his looks go no further than the morrow.

What Bruce Charlton is suggesting, though, is not a social, cultural, or psychological mechanism, but a biological one. He wonders if there may be some environmental cue, or combination of cues, that is causing humans to adopt a “slow-life-history-speed” breeding strategy.

From Dr. Charlton’s post:

Life history speed refers to the reproductive strategy on a scale from FASTER – with rapid maturation, focus on mating effort, and a priority of achieving earlier and more frequent reproduction with less individual care (resources) per child; to SLOWER – with delayed sexual maturation, a long-termist socio-economic plan taking priority over reproduction, fewer offspring, and each child provided with more parental resources.
*
The decision between faster or slower life history strategy is probably ‘set’ in childhood in response to environmental stimuli which (under ancestral conditions) have signaled what was likely to be the most adaptive reproductive strategy (that which is most likely to lead to the greatest number of viable offspring).

Signals of instability (perhaps experiences of starvation or disease, absent father, chaotic environment) lead to a perceived risk of earlier death; and therefore more rapid sexual maturation and early mating efforts implicitly aimed at parenting a larger number of offspring – on the expectation that not children all will survive to adulthood.
*
In contrast, signals of a stable environment trigger a slower life history, because under stable conditions a slow maturing individual with higher parental care can build the ability to exploit specialized niches in a situation of high competition.
(For example, delaying reproductive effort and instead embarking on a long apprenticeship to become a high status and economically secure specialist craftsman; or delaying sexual maturation to ‘build’ a more beautiful and long-lastingly attractive face and body.)
*
It is possible that extreme prosperity/ comfort/ lack of hunger/ lack of disease stress/ unprecedented security and stability (or some other aspect of modernity) is acting as a supernormal stimulus to the ‘mechanism’ of life history calibration in early childhood.
So that an environmental signal (of a type unprecedented in human evolutionary history) may be triggering such a slow life history that (in the real world) it is incapable of replacing the current population – and is therefore maladaptive.

Humans, and large mammals generally, are what evolutionary theorists call “K-strategists” — they breed as though the selective environment is in a stable equilibrium, in which conditions are unlikely to change, and offspring are more likely to survive. This favors having few offspring, and investing heavily in each one. A relevant factor in K strategies, however, is age-related mortality, which affects how much time prospective parents will have to bear children and raise them to self-sufficient maturity. When average age at death is lower (which correlates with, and presumably is indicated to the organism by, various types of environmental stress), this time-span is compressed, so females should space their offspring more closely together (and vice versa).

Our unprecedented control of our habitat means that we’ve now got all sorts of “supernormal stimuli” yanking the behavioral levers that selection installed in us to optimize our survival in long-gone environments. (Examples abound: sweet/fatty foods, artificial lighting, mass communication, pornography, motion pictures, video games, high-speed travel, etc.) Dr. Charlton’s idea — that collapsing birth rates in modern societies may be a biological response to some as-yet-unidentified supernormal stimulus that tricks our bodies into thinking they have forever to reproduce — is very interesting. As Dennis said in the comment thread to Dr. Charlton’s post, I wish I’d thought of it myself.

Read the original post here, and Dennis’s remarks about it, over at his own place, here.

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

This And That

February 20, 2013 – 9:35 pm

I’m just whipped tonight, having got home from work at 5 a.m. this morning, and having to get right back up for another long day.

A miscellany for tonight, then:

— Some Forteana, here and here.

— The world’s Tweets, in real time.

— From Russia, with love (you might have missed this one).

— A fine piece on gun control and the government (with hat tip to Bill Valicella).

— Last, I doubt you’ve ever seen the like of this terrifying amphibious behemoth. Tremble!

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (0)

America 2.0

February 19, 2013 – 1:44 pm

With a hat tip to reader Bill Keezer, here’s a blunt, crepuscular rant from noted gloominary Victor Davis Hanson.

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

The Next Cold War?

February 19, 2013 – 12:02 pm

A young researcher in China has begun a project to find the genetic basis for the heritable components of human intelligence.

We shouldn’t be surprised to see that this is happening in China, and not in the West, where most of the academics I know are of the opinion that there’s no such thing as quantifiable intelligence, that intelligence-testing is rendered worthless by cultural bias, and that even to the extent that there may be a genetic component to “intelligence” (with the implication that there may be racial and sexual differences in its distribution), investigating it is research that shouldn’t even be done at all, because of the possibility of discrimination.

The Chinese are much franker and more realistic about these things than we are. They also don’t seem to share the West’s post-war horror of eugenics. Don’t be surprised if this becomes rather an important topic in the not-too-distant future.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (3)

Another Cobblestone On The Road To Hell

February 19, 2013 – 1:01 am

Milton Freidman responds to President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage.

Here, from beyond the grave.

By Malcolm | Posted in The Economy | Comments (0)

Ave, Kevin!

February 18, 2013 – 9:24 pm

Kevin Kim, whose academic specialty is the study of the world’s religions, has written a stupendous essay on the possibly-divine nature of Peter Sellers’s character Chance, from the movie Being There.

Get thee hence and read it, here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion, Reason and Philosophy | Comments (3)

Disarmed Forces

February 18, 2013 – 3:08 pm

Reader JK sends along a provocative item from ABC News. The gist: the soldiers who were shot at Fort Hood by the jihadist infiltrator Nidal Hasan have been denied various benefits, including the Purple Heart, because the Defense Department refuses to define the shooting as an attack by an enemy combatant — preferring instead to treat it as an ordinary instance of “workplace violence”.

Given that we are, and have been for years, at war with Islamic jihadists in theaters around the world, and given also that Mr. Hasan represented himself as a “Soldier of Allah”, and made perfectly clear at the time of the shooting that he was attacking in the name of holy jihad (he shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he killed our soldiers, just as the 9/11 attackers did as they flew the planes into the towers), this is absolutely indefensible.

We read:

“These guys play stupid every time they’re asked a question about it, they pretend like they have no clue,” said Shawn Manning, who was shot six times that day at Fort Hood. Two of the bullets remain in his leg and spine, he said.

“It was no different than an insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan trying to kill us,” said Manning, who was twice deployed to Iraq and had to retire from the military because of his injuries.

An Army review board initially classified Manning’s injuries as “combat related,” but that finding was later overruled by higher-ups in the Army.

Manning says the “workplace violence” designation has cost him almost $70,000 in benefits that would have been available if his injuries were classified as “combat related.”

“Basically, they’re treating us like I was downtown and I got hit by a car,” he told ABC News.

And:

[Secretary of the Army John] McHugh says awarding Purple Hearts could adversely affect the trial of Major Hasan.

“To award a Purple Heart, it has to be done by a foreign terrorist element,” said McHugh. “So to declare that soldier a foreign terrorist, we are told, I’m not an attorney and I don’t run the Justice Department, but we’re told would have a profound effect on the ability to conduct the trial.”

If you should have any doubt that this was an act of lethal aggression specifically directed against U.S. military personnel by the enemy (if you have a better definition of “combat”, I’m all ears), note that Major Hasan deliberately spared civilians, and fired only at soldiers.

Finally, as part of our “national conversation” about gun control, I’ll remind readers also that the area that Nidal Hasan selected for his rampage was a “gun-free zone”, so nobody was able to stop him until the police arrived. (This gave the Soldier of Allah time to shoot forty-three people.) Furthermore, the weapon Hasan used was not a so-called “assault rifle”, but a single low-caliber handgun. He carried multiple magazines.

Read the article here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Jihad, Guns | Comments (3)

You’ll Always Be A Part Of Me

February 17, 2013 – 10:46 pm

I do love Wikipedia.

Here’s a page listing those parts of our bodies that are named after people.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Chasing Rainbows

February 17, 2013 – 1:16 am

A vexing feature of modern physicalistic non-theism is that, followed to its logical conclusion, it leads to moral nihilism. (I realize that theistic attempts to put morality on an objective basis also face serious challenges, but that’s not the point tonight.)

Moral nihilism being, to most folks, bad, there’s been a rash lately of books and essays attempting to square the circle. Generally the plan seems to be a kind of scientistic utilitarianism, based on the notion that by understanding what leads to human well-being, we can understand the Good to be whatever maximizes it.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m all for maximizing happiness, and the only reason I hold the traditional conservative views I do — about multiculturalism, big government, the welfare state, mass immigration, etc. — is because I think all of those things make for less-happy societies.

But the argument put forward by writers like Sam Harris goes further than that, and claims that Science, which concerns itself entirely with what is, can actually leap the chasm and give us objective oughts.

This is a fool’s errand, and completely unnecessary. We come wired up from the factory with moral instincts and intuitions, and cultures can, and do, build on those in all sorts of ways to get perfectly acceptable results. We should just leave it at that. The desire to ground the Good, somehow, in the indifferent material Universe of the atheist is understandable, but it is doomed to failure at the most elementary philosophical level.

The argument that science can bridge the gap from is to ought seems to be:

1) Science can tell us what things increase and decrease human suffering.
2) Therefore, science can tell us what is morally good, and what isn’t.

This is an “enthymeme”: a syllogism with a piece missing. With the missing bit put in, it looks like this:

1) Science can tell us what things increase and decrease human suffering.
2) We ought to do what decreases human suffering.
3) Therefore, science can tell us what is morally good, and what isn’t.

But science tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of 2). At best it can predict that “if you do X, you’ll get result Y.” And so the whole thing falls apart.

It may be that we all agree with 2) — but what do we consult to arrive at that conclusion? We refer to our moral instincts and moral training, which already tell us what’s right and wrong, and what we ought to do. It is only because of this that people can get away with leaving 2) out of the syllogism: it just seems obvious, so much so that we don’t even mind (or, for that matter, even notice) that it’s missing.

At Twitter, Steven Pinker just linked approvingly to a brief essay by Michael Shermer that is no better than any of the others I’ve seen, and proceeds along the same lines. Indeed, in many ways it’s worse than some, because it tries to pull in natural selection as having something (I’m not sure quite what) to do with objective Good:

Why does a higher standard of living matter morally? Because it increases the probability that an individual will survive and flourish. Why does survival and flourishing matter morally? Because it is the basis of the evolution of all life on earth through natural selection.

If this makes sense to you as an objective foundation for morality, dear reader, you see farther than I.

Take a few minutes to read Mr. Schermer’s essay, here.

The post attracted some pretty sharp commenters. Here’s a good reply, from someone calling himself Daniel, in response to Mr. Schermer’s assertion that “it is science that tells us why witchcraft and sorcery is immoral.’ (My emphasis.)

Science does no such thing, just as science can’t tell me why it’s wrong to rape, pillage and murder. Maybe science can tell me why it feels icky inside to do stuff like that, but it has nothing to say one way or another as to whether that it’s wrong.

This is exactly the right distinction. Science, and evolutionary theory, may well be able to account for why our moral intuitions are what they are — indeed, I believe that the phsyicalist position should be that a correct theory of human evolution must be able to account for this — but they cannot tell us, without reference to some moral intuitions already in place, what our moral instincts ought to be.

Commenter “Trimegistus” gets this point just right:

The trouble with any reason-based, “scientific’ attempt at morality is that it ultimately becomes a vast exercise in question-begging.

What objective, provable reason is there for a person to behave morally at all? Before we can come up with any moral calculus or universal principles, there’s that troublesome Rule Zero which all moral systems assume: “You should try to behave morally.’

But of course there’s no proof for Rule Zero. It’s an axiom. It’s “because I said so’ or just “because.’ And thus all rational, “scientific’ morality crashes straight into the obstacle that sometimes people’s self-interest is served by non-’moral’ behavior. Why should I put morality ahead of what I want? Because it’s moral? It’s an endlessly repeating loop.

Exactly.

The way to cut the Gordian knot here is simple enough: just forget about trying to put morality on an absolute, objective foundation. Just go with what you’ve got. The traditional moral frameworks that have prevailed for long ages in human societies have done so, generally, because they work. Your conscience tells you that it is good to help others, bad to behave selfishly, and really bad to rape and torture little girls? Most folks will agree, and on the basis of those intuitions and others like them (which generally coincide, as it happens, with the prescriptions arrived at by people like Sam Harris and Michael Shermer), we can build stable, happy societies. Isn’t that good enough?

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Science, Religion | Comments (2)

Underwhelmed

February 15, 2013 – 12:13 am

As often happens to me at this point in the week, I’m up late again, working. I’ve been thinking about all sorts of postworthy topics in the past few days, but I just can’t find the time right now to write about them, so they’ll have to wait.

So for tonight, all I have to offer is a brief article from Forbes about that “overwhelming judgment of science” thingy the President mentioned on Tuesday evening.

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

Coda

February 13, 2013 – 3:40 pm

Sad news from Lawrence Auster today: the pancreatic cancer he’s been fighting so stoically has now metastasized to his brain. It’s hard to imagine that he has much time left.

It’s also hard to imagine VFR silenced.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

State Of The Union: Great, But Undergoverned

February 12, 2013 – 11:58 pm

I haven’t got a whole lot to say about the speech. What did anyone expect? There isn’t a problem anywhere on Earth that isn’t best solved by some new Federal program, “partnership”, or “investment”. And all without adding a “single dime” to the deficit.

There was the call for higher Federal minimum wage, the argument for which seemed to be that there should be no job in America, however menial or temporary, that pays less than what it costs to support two kids. So why not just make the minimum wage $100 dollars an hour?

(Hey here’s a thought: you want a better job market for low-end workers? How about not flooding the nation with unskilled immigrants?)

For gun control, there was the expected cavalcade of victims, and ghoulish exploitation of a young murdered girl (who was shot and killed by the feral underclass of a city that already has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation).

There were reassurances that if the separation of powers should present any friction in the run-up to Mr. Obama’s Great Leap Forward, he will be able to push things along anyway by executive fiat. (I can already hear the EPA cracking its knuckles.)

And as always, we need to “ask” the rich to pay more, despite taxes having just been raised a month ago.

Most infuriating of all: mawkish pieties about our obligation to “future generations” — even as we bankrupt them.

And so on. In sum: more, more, more. Feh.

Oh well. It’s been pretty clear for years, and utterly obvious since November, that we are completely, irredeemably, fatally screwed. Enough said, I guess.

As an aside, here’s an interesting item I stumbled upon just now: a look at the literacy level of the State of the Union throughout the nation’s history, president by president. Topping the list: James Madison. Have a look.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (6)

Let’s Just Flush The Whole Bloody Civilization Right Down The Loo And Be Done With It

February 12, 2013 – 4:09 pm

My God, this is unbelievable. The IOC has decided that wrestling will no longer be part of the Olympics as of 2020. Wrestling.

What next, running?

Well, at least we still have synchronized swimming, ping pong, kayaking and badminton, for you traditionalists.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (6)

Thick and Thin

February 12, 2013 – 1:27 pm

Slideshows (scroll down) here and here, respectively.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (5)

Enumerating The Eschaton

February 12, 2013 – 12:01 am

The End of Days, 263 ways, ancient and modern. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Nightly News Notes New Nork Nuke; Nearby Nations Nervous

February 11, 2013 – 11:28 pm

So, it seems that North Korea has detonated another atomic weapon.

I wonder if there will be any room for this in tomorrow’s SOTU, in between calling for new “investments” and introducing all the Lenny Shotniks I’ve heard will be attending.

By Malcolm | Posted in Military | Comments (3)

Skynet

February 11, 2013 – 2:39 pm

If you live in Santo AntÁ´nio da Platina, Brazil, you might want to buy an umbrella. Or, better yet, a new home, somewhere else.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Must-See TV

February 10, 2013 – 11:11 pm

Here’s Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s pre-storm presser from Thursday night. Pure gold.

By Malcolm | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Glass Half Full

February 10, 2013 – 9:59 pm

Readers, as bad as things may be getting over here — and anyone with any sense can see they’re going to get a hell of a lot worse before they get better — at least we don’t have to endure some of the unspeakable horrors that afflict other, less fortunate nations.

So be of stout heart, readers, and let us carry on as best we can, knowing that even as the storm-clouds gather, the days grow dark, and the guiding light of Western civilization begins to flicker and fail, things could always be worse. There could be Japanese pop.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (3)

Battery, Parked

February 10, 2013 – 9:34 pm

Attentive readers may recall that a few years ago we U.S. taxpayers lent $465 million to Tesla, a maker of electric cars. More recently we restructured the loan so that Tesla wouldn’t run out of money. (It is now, after all, a matter of vital national interest that Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial speculations actually pay off.)

Though I don’t think any of us were consulted about this, I guess we’re all Tesla investors now, so it’s only natural to ask: How’s our little business venture going?

Well, I’ll say this: I’ve seen these cars up close (Rob Nail of Singularity University had one parked out front while I was there last year), and they certainly look mighty snazzy, tooling silently around the streets of Silicon Valley. But a New York Times reporter recently tried to use one of these government-subsidized doo-hickeys for the sort of thing people actually need cars for — going from one place to another place far away — and the results were a bit of a letdown. Pit stops for recharging took an hour, and the battery, clearly better suited for the clement Bay Area than for the meteorological rigors of the Northeast, failed to hold its charge in the winter chill. All in all, our man would have been better off in a Yugo, and that’s saying something.

It’s really frustrating; electric batteries just seem to have some serious intrinsic limitations. As Joshua TreviÁ±o remarked Twitter, just imagine if instead there were some sort of energy-dense substance that was cheap to produce — maybe some sort of naturally-occurring material that concentrated eons of energy from the Sun into some convenient liquid form — that our vehicles could simply carry on-board in some sort of container?

Naah. That’s just pie in the sky, folks.

Anyway, read the story here.

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

Artificial Inanity

February 9, 2013 – 11:55 pm

I’ve mentioned the incomparable Deepak Chopra in these pages a time or two in the past. The man is of course the world’s greatest living mountebank, and has made a fabulous living hawking 24-carat flapdoodle to swooning suckers.

You have to admire talent like that. As it turns out, somebody admires it enough to have provided us with a fully operational software emulation of the glitter-templed Guru of Woo-Woo himself, for those scary moments when you really need some “Deep” thoughts, but keep getting a busy signal on the Quantum Consciousness Hotline.

Take it for a spin here. It’s as good as the real thing.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (4)

Lèse Majesté

February 9, 2013 – 10:46 pm

In case you haven’t heard, the chattering classes are all atwitter about a talk given at the recent National Prayer Breakfast by one Ben Carson, chief of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins.

At the podium, standing just a few feet away from President Obama, Dr. Carson spoke about several matters of national policy — in particular, deficit spending, health care, and taxation — in a way that marked him as, let’s just say, less than fully supportive of Mr. Obama’s approach.

This in turn evoked a range of responses. It was catnip for mainstream “conservative” sorts — who immediately, with the hope that springs eternal, began having moist thoughts about 2016 — while for more than a few liberal observers it was shocking effrontery.

I thought it was a pretty good speech overall, though very long-winded and rather a little too attentive to the good works of Dr. Ben Carson (not to mention being awfully secular for a prayer-breakfast, I should have thought — but hey, what do I know about prayer-breakfasts). It certainly warmed me to see the president tweaked from the podium like that; it was pleasant to watch him trying to swallow some of his own medicine. (I’m guessing, here, that some difficulty with deglutition must have been why Mr. Obama kept lifting his chin in the air as Dr. Carson began to warm to his topic.)

Dr. Carson does seem to have done some good work with his charitable foundation, which encourages children to read. It’s nice also to see this sort of work done by private associations — the intermediary, self-organizing layer of civil society that the liberal urge to bring everything under the direct central supervision of the Federal sovereign continuously seeks to destroy. Perhaps that was part of the reason Dr. Carson spent so much time talking about it.

Anyway, watch the speech here, if you haven’t already seen it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Flying Squid

February 9, 2013 – 1:19 am

That’s right, flying squid. And as fast as Usain Bolt, if flying isn’t enough. Here.

(“Fast ‘n’ bulbous”, as I think a wise man once said.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (0)

Spot The Bug

February 8, 2013 – 10:35 pm

Here’s an clever idea: crowdsourcing of malaria diagnosis, using a simple video game.

Have a look.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Technology | Comments (0)

The Idols Of The Tribe

February 8, 2013 – 10:15 pm

If you’ve been following the national “conversation” about immigration and race relations (at least as publicly reported), it may come as a surprise to you to learn that one can speak about these things in a heterodox way on any grounds but “hate”. To express such dissenting opinions, however rational their basis, and however common they may be in the private thoughts of millions of Americans, is to risk career-threatening opprobrium, and exclusion from polite society. So most people don’t do it.

To get this stuff “wrong” these days, you see, is not simply to be wrong (or even, in the smug phrase now so popular amongst self-styled “progressives”, to be “on the wrong side of history”): it is to be morally wrong, another word for which is “evil”. And it’s quite OK, as it has always been, to hate evil people. (It’s actually quite fun, and brings folks together.)

Nevertheless, here’s the radioactive dissident John Derbyshire, giving it a go anyway in an address to a recent web-conference. His remarks, despite their heretical partiality toward his own, much-despiséd people and culture, are mild-mannered and thoroughly unmalevolent. Read them at the peril of your soul.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

My Kind Of Cat

February 8, 2013 – 1:24 am

Here. Courtesy of Devin Townsend.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

The Girl’s Got Rhythm

February 7, 2013 – 12:46 am

I’m swamped with work this week, so no time for writing. But as always, I’d hate for you to go away empty-handed — so here’s a fantastic dance scene by the one and only Eleanor Powell, accompanied by a young Buddy Rich.

By Malcolm | Posted in Dance | Comments (6)

There Must Be A Better World Somewhere

February 6, 2013 – 1:40 am

Here’s Dr. John.

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

Two Scents Worth

February 5, 2013 – 10:51 pm

If you’re like me, you’ve been wondering whether there are any critters out there that can locate food by way of odor gradients. Well, meet the Eastern mole: the mammal that smells in stereo.

By Malcolm | Posted in Curiosities | Comments (4)

Stop The Presses!

February 5, 2013 – 12:44 pm

This just in: the largest known prime number is now 257,885,161 – 1.

More here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Holy Wood Brown

February 4, 2013 – 8:59 pm

I almost never write about gustatory matters here, but I’ll make an exception to rave about a particularly outstanding offering from one of America’s most creative microbreweries, Dogfish Head.

Dogfish Head specializes in unusual and high-strength ales. Their best-known products are their highly hopped IPAs (the 90-Minute Imperial IPA, weighing in at 9% alcohol by volume, is universally acclaimed, and rightly so). But the IPA series is actually rather middle-of-the-road compared to some of DH’s more exotic brews.

One of these is something called Palo Santo Marron, a completely over-the-top brown ale, thick and sweet and sticky and almost black. The name refers to a specially made 10,000-gallon vat that the ale ages in, made of “palo santo” wood (Guaiacum sanctum, also known as “lignum vitae”). Among its many uses, palo santo is the same wood traditionally used to make British police truncheons — and at 12% ABV, a couple bottles of this stuff will have roughly the same effect.

The rich flavor of this ale is so complex as to make description difficult. It is caramelly and malty, not hoppy, and evokes coffee, dark fruit, and even cocoa. Behind it all is the smoldering warmth of that 12% (for perspective, Budweiser is 5% ABV).

I could go on, but others already have. Read some reviews here and here.

In short: this is amazing stuff. Get some if you can, beer lovers.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Edge Of The World

February 4, 2013 – 5:20 pm

February is probably the quietest and loneliest month on the Outer Cape, but in many ways the deep winter is most beautiful time of year out here, I think.

Here’s the high bluff at the end of Longnook Road, Truro, late yesterday afternoon.
 

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (0)

Worlds In Collision

February 4, 2013 – 12:13 am

Here’s the late Chris Kyle being interviewed by one Belinda Luscombe, an editor at Time.

The gulf between them is obvious. It seems to me that to her he is almost incomprehensible, as if he belonged to some alien species. (Which probably isn’t very far from the truth: I expect that Mr. Kyle had very little in common with the males that Ms. Luscombe encounters in her usual orbit. If what marks off different species is the unlikeliness of their breeding together, then the assessment seems about right.)

Most alien of all to Ms. Luscombe, I suspect, was Mr. Kyle’s willingness to to say: “these are my people, and those are our enemies” — and that he would actually go so far as to kill his enemies to protect his own people. It is discrimination in its purest form.

George Orwell said that “people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” Chris Kyle was such a man. No matter how Belinda Luscombe might feel about such things, and about such men, he would have died to protect her.

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

Timing Is Everything

February 3, 2013 – 6:01 pm

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.”

– Leonardo do Vinci

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Chris Kyle, 1974-2013

February 3, 2013 – 12:31 am

We’ve just heard that the renowned Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, the most effective sniper in American military history, has been murdered in Texas. Details are scant. Our deepest condolences to his young family.

By Malcolm | Posted in Military | Comments (5)

Service Notice

February 3, 2013 – 12:28 am

We were down for a while tonight: our hosting service, Bluehost.com, had its first extended outage in the seven years I’ve been with them. (I enthusiastically recommend them, nevertheless, to any of you who are looking for an Internet host; Bluehost provides outstanding and highly reliable service for an insignificant sum of money. There isn’t a better deal anywhere.)

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Gang Green

February 2, 2013 – 7:38 pm

Here’s a fine curmudgeonly rant about some of the lousy products we’ve had forced on us by our government’s shouldering aside of free markets in the name of saving the Planet. (My pet peeve: those bloody CF bulbs.)

If, upon reading this, your inclination is to leave a comment about how wonderful it is once again to hear the sweetsweetsweet of the prothonotary warbler along the meanders of the Passaic, keep it to yourself. I want toilets that flush properly.

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

Ed Koch, 1924-2013

February 1, 2013 – 12:53 pm

Ed Koch died today. He was a good mayor (not perfect, but who is?), a hell of a character, and a real New Yorker. We Gothamites will miss him.

R.I.P., Ed. You did just fine.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Machines Making Machines

January 31, 2013 – 12:13 am

This is fantastic: Japanese robots making German cars.

Hat tip: William Gibson.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

It Can Happen Here

January 30, 2013 – 11:19 pm

Here’s a timely quote from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, in which he describes the same liability that so vexed the Founders:

If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Isn’t It Romantic?

January 28, 2013 – 6:13 pm

More on why women in combat units is a really bad idea. Will somebody remind me again why this is necessary?

(HT- Laura Wood.)

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

Competition For Excrement Is Fierce

January 28, 2013 – 12:38 pm

If you’re like me (of course you are!), you’ve been lying awake at night, asking yourself:

“How the hell do South African dung beetles roll their balls in a straight line? Sure, polarized light from the Sun works fine during the day (duh!), but what about at night, when many of them do their best work?”

Well, fret no longer. The answer is here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Darwin and Biology, Science, Curiosities | Comments (3)

Uff Da!

January 28, 2013 – 12:11 pm

The latest global-warming story from the Research Council of Norway: things aren’t as bad, perhaps, as Mr. Gore, IPCC, and the rest of the AGW syndicate might have you believe.

Excerpt:

After Earth’s mean surface temperature climbed sharply through the 1990s, the increase has levelled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilised somewhat, despite the fact that CO2 emissions and other anthropogenic factors thought to contribute to global warming are still on the rise.

Didn’t Lord Monckton just get frog-marched out of a climate conference for pointing this out? Whoops…

A number of factors affect the formation of climate development. The complexity of the climate system is further compounded by a phenomenon known as feedback mechanisms, i.e. how factors such as clouds, evaporation, snow and ice mutually affect one another.

Uncertainties about the overall results of feedback mechanisms make it very difficult to predict just how much of the rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature is due to manmade emissions.

Uncertainties! Complexity! “Difficult to predict”!! Who knew??

Jeez, you could knock me down with a feather.

More:

Professor [Terje] Berntsen explains the changed predictions:

“The Earth’s mean temperature rose sharply during the 1990s. This may have caused us to overestimate climate sensitivity.

“We are most likely witnessing natural fluctuations in the climate system ”“ changes that can occur over several decades ”“ and which are coming on top of a long-term warming. The natural changes resulted in a rapid global temperature rise in the 1990s, whereas the natural variations between 2000 and 2010 may have resulted in the levelling off we are observing now.

Crikey — “natural variations”! Whoever could have imagined such a thing? (Well, that is, aside from those detested kuffar who’ve insisted on pointing out that the Earth has gone through many cycles of warming and cooling in the distant past, long before we arrived on the scene.)

Boy, if this keeps up, we might even have to cancel that whole subjugate-the-world’s-economy thing we’ve all been looking forward to, dang it.

More here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Global Warming | Comments (0)

Stairway To Hell

January 27, 2013 – 1:15 pm

In case you haven’t been paying attention, a major Egyptian city has descended into anarchy and violent chaos. I’ve no time for commentary, but you can read about it here.

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

Epochs Sometimes Occur

January 27, 2013 – 12:39 am

More from Tocqueville’s Democracy In America:

There is one sort of patriotic attachment which principally arises from that instinctive, disinterested, and undefinable feeling which connects the affections of man with his birthplace. This natural fondness is united to a taste for ancient customs, and to a reverence for ancestral traditions of the past; those who cherish it love their country as they love the mansions of their fathers. They enjoy the tranquillity which it affords them; they cling to the peaceful habits which they have contracted within its bosom; they are attached to the reminiscences which it awakens, and they are even pleased by the state of obedience in which they are placed. This patriotism is sometimes stimulated by religious enthusiasm, and then it is capable of making the most prodigious efforts. It is in itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and of sentiment.

…But there is another species of attachment to a country which is more rational than the one we have been describing. It is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful and more lasting; it is coeval with the spread of knowledge, it is nurtured by the laws, it grows by the exercise of civil rights, and, in the end, it is confounded with the personal interest of the citizen. A man comprehends the influence which the prosperity of his country has upon his own welfare; he is aware that the laws authorize him to contribute his assistance to that prosperity, and he labors to promote it as a portion of his interest in the first place, and as a portion of his right in the second.

But epochs sometimes occur, in the course of the existence of a nation, at which the ancient customs of a people are changed, public morality destroyed, religious belief disturbed, and the spell of tradition broken, whilst the diffusion of knowledge is yet imperfect, and the civil rights of the community are ill secured, or confined within very narrow limits. The country then assumes a dim and dubious shape in the eyes of the citizens; they no longer behold it in the soil which they inhabit, for that soil is to them a dull inanimate clod; nor in the usages of their forefathers, which they have been taught to look upon as a debasing yoke; nor in religion, for of that they doubt; nor in the laws, which do not originate in their own authority; nor in the legislator, whom they fear and despise.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Gotcha!

January 25, 2013 – 11:29 pm

Remember those “recess appointments” to the National Labor Relations Board that President Obama went ahead and made last January, when the Senate wasn’t in recess? The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today ruled them unconstitutional. The Obama administration seems inclined to ignore the ruling, with Jay Carney today declaring that it will have “no impact” on the NLRB’s activities. (Because, you know, it’s just some “court” or whatever.)

Well, we’ll see about that. There might be an interesting separation-of-powers scuffle shaping up here.

Blogger Moe Lane comments here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)