Harris on Hedges

July 27, 2011 – 1:43 pm

In this new climate of austerity, when we have to wean ourselves from so many lavish indulgences, it’s good to be reminded of life’s simple pleasures — like seeing someone give that Chris Hedges a good poke in the eye. Sam Harris does so here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (0)

This And That

July 26, 2011 – 9:54 pm

I had hoped to find some quiet time today for getting some thoughts written down about recent events (in particular the massacre in Oslo and what it means for the defense-of-the-West club that has been spotlighted from all angles in its aftermath), but it was not to be, and now, with a couple of very long work-days coming up, I’m not going to have much of an opportunity until Friday at the earliest. (I realize that my not having commented on it all has not exactly stopped the Earth in its orbit, but I think it’s incumbent on anybody who has written the sorts of things that I’ve been writing in this blog for years now to say where he stands in the wake of Mr. Breivik’s actions, and I intend to do so.)

For tonight, though, just a few links — starting with a couple from Science Daily:

— From the University of Leicester, what you might call “penetrating” insights into a popular activity.

— Does recent research into epigenetics mean new life for Lamarckism?

— In a follow-up to our story a while back about zombie ants, here’s a similar game involving ladybugs.

— On a more political note: Dennis Prager enumerates a few of the reasons why, as John Boehner said last night, “bigger government means smaller people”.

Might be quiet here for a couple of days.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (2)

Dinner And A Dance

July 25, 2011 – 10:06 pm

I’ve been brooding and distracted, and trying to organize my thoughts for a serious post or two, but have hardly had a moment to myself all day, and so have nothing much to offer tonight.

Except, of course, this appetizing illustration of sodium-ion channels in action, courtesy of my daughter Chloe.

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

For The Spirit Of The Living Creature Was In The Wheels

July 25, 2011 – 2:15 pm

A conversation with my father on the subject of the Armenian mystic Gurdjieff has led me to a re-reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which apparently G. had recommended to his study groups. (My father was a member of Gurdjieff’s London group after the war until G.’s death in 1949, and in fact went to Paris a couple of times to offer medical assistance in G’s last year.)

One of the book’s central messages is that God is dead. New evidence, however, reveals that God hasn’t been dead at all. He’s just focusing mostly on Nascar these days.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (2)

For What End?

July 24, 2011 – 3:31 pm

In a dark mood, I ran across this little shaft of light yesterday:

When the sound and wholesome nature of man acts as an entirety, when he feels himself in the world as a grand, beautiful, worthy and worthwhile whole, when this harmonious comfort affords him a pure, untrammelled delight: then the universe, if it could be sensible of itself, would shout for joy at having attained its goal and wonder at the pinnacle of its own essence and evolution. For what end is served by all the expenditure of suns and planets and moons, of stars and Milky Ways, of comets and nebula, of worlds evolving and passing away, if at last a happy man does not involuntarily rejoice in his existence?

– Goethe, Essay On Winckelmann

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

I Can Quit Anytime I Want

July 23, 2011 – 3:11 pm

According to this item, Internet-connectivity addiction is as powerful, and as difficult during withdrawal, as habituation to alcohol or tobacco.

This is such palpable nonsense that I thought it warranted an immediate post. Perhaps I’ll mention it on Twitter, too. But first I’ll see what the reaction’s been around the blogosphere.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Movers And Shakers

July 23, 2011 – 3:00 pm

Dear Mayor Bloomberg:

According to Scientific American, a meta-analysis of seven studies of the effects of salt consumption finds little or no health benefit from reduced-sodium diets.

Would you mind calling off the mutaween?

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

Oslo

July 23, 2011 – 1:54 pm

It is too soon to write a post that comments in any analytical way on the Oslo massacre, though its ramifications will be profound, perhaps even to the point of changing the arc of European history. In its grotesque particulars, which are still coming to light, it is an act of such devastating horror, of such monstrous, naked evil, that it would be unseemly to say anything more at this point than that all of civilization today shares Norway’s shock and grief.

There will be a very great deal to say about it in days and weeks to come, but not today.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Near-Death Experience

July 21, 2011 – 10:57 pm

I’m talking about the weather, of course. This heat wave is as bad as it ever gets here in Gotham, and that’s saying something.

Every year, as Spring latens, a creeping, hope-killing fear begins to stir in me, as I hear the brazen hinges of the Hell-mouth starting to swing open, and know that Satan, thinking of me as always, is warming his tongs and pincers in the fire below. From mid-May until the cavalry arrives in October, I eat from the Tree of Ez-Zakkoum, and taste the black despair of the damned.

On rare occasions, I write about it in these pages (see, for example, in chronological order, here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here), but after crawling into Midtown for a long day’s work, then teaching a very sweaty class back here in Brooklyn, I am absolutely drained. So there will be no post tonight. Tomorrow, perhaps, should I live.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Send In The Clowns

July 20, 2011 – 10:07 pm

Forgive me for asking, but what the hell are we doing aligning ourselves with these people? We’ve just given them the stamp of official US recognition, and granted them access to billions of dollars of frozen Libyan assets.

Also: can someone explain to me why on Earth we should be giving one nickel of foreign aid to China? (Or to anybody, for that matter, when we have to borrow it in the first place, largely from the Chinese?)

Yes, yes, I’m ranting, I know. Just can’t help it sometimes.

I hang out with a lot of older folks, and I’ve noticed something: the older they get, the more likely they are to think the world has simply gone insane. I wasn’t born until 1956, but I’m already pretty sure they’re right.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (23)

What Goes Around Comes Around

July 20, 2011 – 12:17 pm

Looks like a little turf war brewing in Gaza. Story here.

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

Master Of Disguise

July 20, 2011 – 12:14 pm

I hardly know what to say about this one:

Police arrest goat accused of armed robbery

Hat tip to hbd chick.

By Malcolm | Posted in Rubbish | Comments (5)

Monkey Steals Peach

July 19, 2011 – 3:39 pm

One of the ways China has been eating our lunch lately is by sitting on the sidelines as we spend and bleed in God-forsaken Mideast ratholes, then snapping up the opportunities left behind as we stagger homeward with our pockets turned out. The latest example is here.

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

Just Sayin’

July 19, 2011 – 3:26 pm

The investing website Seeking Alpha has published a transcript of CEO Steve Wynn’s remarks during the Q&A portion of Wynn Resorts’s Q2 conference call yesterday. A notable excerpt:

Well, here’s our problem. There are a host of opportunities for expansion in Las Vegas, a host of opportunities to create tens of thousands of jobs in Las Vegas. I know that I could do 10,000 more myself and according to the Chamber of Commerce and the Visitors Convention Bureau, if we hired 10,000 employees, it would create another 20,000 additional jobs for a grand total of 30,000. I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on, on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating. And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems — that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration. And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America. You bet. And until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, “Oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.” Well, this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America. The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government, and there’s no need to soft peddling it [sic], it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

Yeah, yeah, I know: who cares what Steve Wynn thinks, etc. (after all, what does he know about running a business?).

Good rant, though.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Know Your Stuff

July 19, 2011 – 1:04 pm

With a hat-tip to our friend The Stiletto, we direct you to a pungent example of the machinery of justice at work.

The case concerns an Iowa jailbird who, it was alleged, had thrown feces at one of the screws — a simple act of defiance that is fully conformant with traditional primate style, and which will be familiar to anyone who has hob-nobbed with the caged chimpanzees at the zoo. (After all, you have to work with what you’ve got.) The inmate did the chimps one better, however — by exulting, after his home-made missile had found its mark, “I got you, [dysphemism for correctional officer]. I threw shit on you.’

Assaulting a prison guard with biological effluents is a felony under Iowa Code section 708.3B, and legal proceedings ensued. The defendant was found guilty, and appealed the verdict. In the appellate court, the defense sought to undermine the Court’s confidence as to the nature of the substance thrown, and raised two issues: first, that the prosecution had not called any expert witnesses to establish beyond doubt that the res iactus was, in fact, fecal in nature, and second, that the word “shit” in the accused’s triumphal ejaculation was semantically ambiguous, due to the word’s frequent appearance as a non-specific signifier in vernacular English.

With regard to the first point, the Legal Skills Prof Blog‘s James B. Levy notes that “the appellant court concluded that the ability to identify feces is within the province of the average person”. He quotes the court’s decision:

Indeed, it would be a rare person who had no personal experience with feces. We do not believe the identification of feces falls solely within the domain of expert testimony.

Hard to argue with any of that, I think.

The court, did, however, agree about the ambiguity of the word “shit”, and offered support for this view in a splendid footnote:

“Shit’ is defined as excrement. Webster”Ÿs Third New Int”Ÿl Dictionary 2098 (1993). But, the word has also been defined as nonsense, foolishness, something of little value, trivial and usually boastful or inaccurate talk, and a contemptible person. Id. This now ubiquitous word has acquired numerous popular usages apart from its literal meaning. It has been used to describe people, places, and things and to express a wide variety of emotions such as disappointment, disgust, despair, resignation, amazement, awe, shock, anger, and surprise. For examples, see State v. Vance, 790 N.W.2d 775, 784 (Iowa 2010) (“He is going to find the shit . . . .’); Estate of Harris v. Papa John’s Pizza, 679 N.W.2d 673, 676 (Iowa 2004) (“[S]hould be on his ”žshit list”Ÿ . . . .’); Civil Service Commission of Coralville v. Johnson, 653 N.W.2d 533, 541 (Iowa 2002) (“You ain”Ÿt going to be shit.’); Wilson v. IBP, Inc., 558 N.W.2d 132, 143 (Iowa 1996) (“[T]his guy”Ÿs full of shit.’); Marks v. Estate of Hartgerink, 528 N.W.2d 539, 542 (Iowa 1995) (“It takes a lot of guts and shit . . . .’); State v. Anderson, 448 N.W.2d 32, 34 (Iowa 1989) (“[W]hat”Ÿs this not guilty shit.’); Knox v. Municipal Court of City of Des Moines, 185 N.W.2d 705, 709 (Iowa 1971) (“You are still a Fascist and your swastika (indicating) Heil Harrison, Heil Harrison and all that shit.’); Graves v. O’Hara, 576 N.W.2d 625, 627 (Iowa Ct. App. 1998) (“We have f**king shit to haul . . . .’); State v. Shortridge, 555 N.W.2d 843, 845 (Iowa Ct. App. 1996) (“Holy shit, let”Ÿs get out of here . . . .’); Peck v. Employment Appeal Board, 492 N.W.2d 438, 439 (Iowa Ct. App. 1992) (“[A]sking what ”žshit jobs”Ÿ were available.’); State v. Findling, 456 N.W.2d 3, 7 (Iowa Ct. App. 1990) (“I mean this is really big shit here.’); Wiysel v. William Penn College, 448 N.W.2d 712, 713 (Iowa Ct. App. 1989) (“[H]is words were so much ”žsanctimonious shit.”Ÿ’); and Blong v. Snyder, 361 N.W.2d 312, 314 (Iowa Ct. App. 1984) (“[They] told him the pieces he had run were all ”žshit.”Ÿ’). The remarkable versatility of the word “shit’ is also demonstrated in George Carlin”Ÿs “Filthy Words,’ a verbatim transcript of which is set forth in full in the appendix to the United States Supreme Court”Ÿs opinion F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726, 752-53, 98 S. Ct. 3026, 3042, 57 L. Ed. 2d 1073, 1094 (1978).

Or, as any Zen Buddhist will tell you: words are just “a finger pointing at the moon”.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

JC And QM

July 18, 2011 – 5:49 pm

I’ve been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s outstanding history of Christianity (it’s enormously absorbing, and full of fascinating detail) and I’m currently immersed in the factional disputes of the fourth century A.D., when the biggest problem of the day was to work out a good account of the Trinity, and in particular the nature of Christ. It’s tricky — this triune-Godhead business can get awfully knotty, when you get down to details.

Leaving aside the Holy Spirit, about which nobody seemed to have any clear idea at all, the problem was how to assemble a coherent model that included all of these three features at once:

1) God, the First Person of the Trinity, is of the purest, transcendent divinity, eternal and uncreated and beyond real human understanding. There’s nothing human about God.

2) Christ was a man. That’s vitally important to his role as Redeemer: that he suffered as a man would suffer.

3) Christ is divine. Obviously this is a essential tenet of Christianity. In some sense at least, it is necessary to be able to say that Christ is God.

So the question is: what is Christ, that he can bridge, in one entity, the gulf between man and God? If Christ is to be truly identical to God, then he cannot in any meaningful sense be human; to the extent that Christ is human, he is necessarily distinct from God. Broadly speaking, there were two opposing views, neither perfectly satisfactory.

First was the view that Christ was in fact simply God made flesh, and that to the extent Christ had any real human nature at all, it was mixed in him with God’s divinity as water mixes with wine. But if you simply make Christ God Incarnate, then you are saying the the mind of Christ was really the mind of God. This was horrifying to some theologians, as it completely fails to satisfy requirement 2).

Second is the view known at the time as Arianism, which saw Christ as subordinate to God: a created being, partly human and partly divine, in which God’s divinity mixed with Jesus’s human nature in the way that oil mixes with water — separate and distinct, though both contained in the same vessel. The problem with this view is that by binding Christ so firmly to his humanity, it diminishes him in relation to God.

Attempts to untie this knot often descended to plays on language. Were God and Christ one “substance” (homoousios)? Were they of non-identical, but similar “substance” (homoiousios)? Or were they of different “substance” altogether (heteroousios)?

Well, who the hell knows! The one-substance faction gained the upper hand at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, but the problem never went away.

Anyway, Maculloch’s account of all this wrangling, and all the parties involved, is very interesting. As I was reading about it, though, a stray idea popped into my head: why not a quantum Christ?

The way a piece of quantumstuff (a “quon”) presents itself depends on the way you measure it (to be specific, in the way you reduce its eigenfunction): measure it one way, it’s a wave, measure it another way, it’s a particle. Also, the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics specifies complementary pairs of attributes: the accuracy with which you determine the value of one attribute of a complementary pair (position, say) causes a proportional fuzziness in its complement (the complement of position is momentum). If you conduct your measurement so as to have maximum certainty about attribute a, its complementary attribute b is maximally undefined; it just can’t be helped. (And by the way, this isn’t just a problem with measurement, either: making a precise measurement of a forces b actually to become maximally undefined.)

So maybe Jesus the Son of Man is just Christ-measured-as-a-human. And maybe Divinity and Humanity are complementary attributes of Quantum Christ: zero in on his human aspect, and you know nothing certain about his divinity; focus on his Godhead, and you cannot pin him down as a man.

Just a thought. Please don’t ask me what the equations are going to look like.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion | Comments (11)

Nice Work If You Can Get It

July 16, 2011 – 11:18 pm

With a hat-tip to commenter “Scott” over at Mangan’s, here’s a meaty interview, from King World News, with financial analyst Jim Rickards on the arcane topic of credit default swaps (and why they’re evil).

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Hardware Bug

July 16, 2011 – 10:51 pm

Well, here’s something I just found out the hard way: insects can get inside your laptop screen.

I was sitting at the computer, saw a bug crawling across the screen, reached up to knock it away, and ended up squashing it. I went to wipe it off and realized it was behind the clear plastic cover of the LCD screen. There is no way to remove it. It will be there forever.

Low on the scale of human suffering, I know. But awfully annoying.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Just The Check, Please

July 15, 2011 – 10:01 pm

Four years ago I reported on a chicken-wing-eating competition I chanced upon at Grand Central Station. I had never seen professional gurgitators at work before; the best thing I can say about the experience was that it has helped me, in contemplating the great arc of civilization, to lower my expectations.

Like other sports, though, the eating circuit has its stars — its Federers and Mannings and Mickelsons — and they make a pretty good living, I think. (At the very least, they don’t go hungry.) But the honor and glory, it turns out, comes at a heavy price.

Learn more here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (1)

In Defeat, Defiance

July 14, 2011 – 10:50 pm

Sadly, the BULB Act, H.R. 2417 (see our earlier post here) died in the House the other day. Due to some procedural maneuvering the only way to bring it to the floor for a vote was in such a way as to require a two-thirds majority, and it fell slightly short. (This was in part because the bill greedily included language preventing the states from introducing similar restrictions, which for some states-rights advocates was too much. The Senate version wisely did not include this proviso; such matters of local commerce are rightly a matter for state legislatures, not the federal government.)

But the fight isn’t over yet; conservatives may still be able to get the repeal appended to future legislation that requires only a majority vote.

More here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (27)

Just For The Record

July 13, 2011 – 10:07 pm

A week or so ago we posted a little poll, asking readers what they thought was the best album ever. Given the number of people who pass by here every day, I thought we’d see a lot more responses — it’s something that everyone has an opinion about, and unlike most topics, you won’t get any arguments in the comment thread — but we did get some, and a lot of them were on my short list, too.

I asked for just one choice apiece, because once you get started it’s hard to stop. Just off the top of my head I’d name as candidates Sgt. Pepper’s, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Bitches Brew, Live/Evil, One Size Fits All, Overnight Sensation, Absolutely Free, Led Zep I, Led Zep IV, Axis: Bold As Love, Electric Ladyland, Truth, Kind Of Blue, Avalon, Tommy, Who’s Next, Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Disraeli Gears, The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore East, Innervisions, Abraxas, American Beauty, Synchronicity, Fragile, London Calling, My Aim Is True, In The Court of the Crimson King, Trout Mask Replica, and… well, I could just keep on going, including a bunch you’d probably agree with, and probably some you’ve never heard of.

A few people have written to ask why I chose Close to the Edge. What can I say? It’s easily the best prog-rock album ever made, one of my all-time favorite bands at the apogee of their creative arc. It’s really just about a perfect record, and it includes the best song Yes ever wrote: the incomparable And You And I. Even the Roger Dean cover design is a masterpiece. If there’s anything at all I would have changed about that album, it would only have been the sequence, which I think was exactly backwards: the title track should have been all of Side Two, and Side One should have opened with Siberian Khatru and closed with And You And I. But that’s just a teensy quibble.

Yes, it was hard not to pick Sgt. Pepper’s, in deference to what is surely the most influential and important album of all time, but there’s just something about Close to the Edge. It just kills me, every time. Still.

Anyway, thanks to those of you who named names. For those who didn’t, the thread is still open.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (11)

NASSA

July 13, 2011 – 6:03 pm

With a hat tip to a commenter at Mangan’s, here’s a story that needs to be told: America’s forgotten Negro astronauts.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

Help Wanted

July 12, 2011 – 4:32 pm

A friend and former magazine editor contacted me recently to ask my help in finding a designer for a freelance project she’s doing: a new magazine for a branch of our armed services. The person she thought best qualified for the job, a former colleague, turned down the work because of the moral distastefulness of working for the military (as if this person didn’t owe his own taken-for-granted freedom, safety, and prosperity to the protective vigilance and incomparable prowess of our armed forces).

Anyway, before I start ranting, I’ll just pass the request along to our readers: anyone know an experienced magazine designer (logo, masthead, etc.)? If so, send an email to the address listed in our “About Me” page, at top right.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Peas Be Upon Them

July 12, 2011 – 3:48 pm

I haven’t said much about the debt-limit squabble, for at least two reasons:

First, what’s the point of having a debt limit anyway, if it just gets raised whenever we approach it?

Second, in the real world, as Kevin Williamson points out here, the only meaningful debt limit isn’t one that you impose upon yourself; it’s the limit that you reach when creditors are no longer willing to lend you money. Because the sums the disputing parties are squabbling over are such a drop in the bucket compared to our overall debt (even the four trillion that was being bandied about until recently as a “grand package”, now out of reach, is still only a couple of years’ worth of accumulating US debt, and far less than that if interest rates go up, which they’ll inevitably do if our credit sours).

So, given that we’ve already screwed ourselves beyond all hope anyway, and that all this posturing amounts to nothing more than raising the seat-backs and tray-tables prior to impact, I’d appreciate it if they’d all just agree to raise the damn debt limit — if only for the sake of giving the financial markets a last rally or two before we hit the ground. I’m sure we could all use a little extra cash for batteries, dried food, and ammo.

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

No Good Deed…

July 12, 2011 – 1:36 pm

… goes unpunished.

Next time, just throw it back.

Accountants say the man who caught the home run ball that Derek Jeter smashed for his 3,000th hit Saturday will have to pay as much as $14,000 in taxes, New York media report.

Christian Lopez, 23, caught the ball and promptly handed it over to the Yankees without demanding any kind of payment, the Daily News reported. The Yankees rewarded him with suite seats for the rest of the season, plus a heap of autographed team memorabilia.

That’s what could cost Lopez. According to The New York Times, the total value of the seats and loot could exceed $120,000. The IRS would consider that to be taxable income, several accountants told both newspapers.

We’ll see how this one plays out; there may be a loophole. Story here.

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

Why The Long Face?

July 12, 2011 – 1:25 pm

From the historian Diarmaid MacCulloch:

Human societies are based on the human tendency to want things, and are geared to satisfying those wants: possessions or facilities to bring ease and personal satisfaction. The results are frequently disappointing, and always terminate in the embarrassing non sequitur of death.

— Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, p. 200

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

Be Vewy Quiet

July 11, 2011 – 11:14 pm

If you’ve ever wondered what the Recording Industry looks like from the inside, you’re in luck. Have a peek here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Close Call!

July 11, 2011 – 10:26 pm

I’m happy to report that the BULB Act — a cheeky little bill that would have preserved for Americans the freedom to buy whatever kind of light bulbs they like for use in their own homes — now appears unlikely to pass.

Well, good. It was a dumb move anyway. After all, our leaders have made it very clear that they have our best interests in mind here, and an insolent little bill like that is exactly the sort of thing that simply can’t be tolerated if we’re serious about winning the future. I mean, does anyone really think that American consumers (and those silly “free markets”) are responsible enough to be trusted with important decisions about things like light-bulbs? C’mon, man! Let’s get real.

(To tell the truth, I’ll bet the legislation’s sponsors never really even wanted it to pass, anyway. You know how we kids are: always testing the limits, just to see what we can get away with — but deep down inside we’re relieved when Dad puts his foot down.)

Anyway, as thrilled as I am that this bill won’t be passed, I guess it’s a teeny bit of a shame in some ways, because those compact-fluorescent bulbs we’ll all be using as of next year A) make an unpleasant light, B) have a far shorter lifespan if you don’t run them in special CFL fixtures (or if you switch them on and off frequently, instead of leaving them on for at least four hours at a time), C) don’t work at all well with dimmers, D) are a real headache to dispose of, E) can’t support those clip-on lampshades that we all have in our houses, and F) come from China. (And although of course I know it’s wrong, I have to admit there’s a part of me that kind of liked, in a naughty sort of way, the idea of being able to decide for myself what light-bulbs to use. It felt kind of grown-up and cool.)

But hey, no big deal — and it really isn’t our place to be worrying about things like this anyway. Like the President said today, we ordinary folks have got a lot of other things on our plate: we’re worrying about our families; we’re worrying about our jobs; we’re worrying about our neighborhoods — and that’s why we’ve got smart people in Washington who are paid to worry about all that other stuff. Let’s let ’em do their job! It’s always good to have more rules (I mean, otherwise, things get kind of unruly, right?), and you can bet that before long we’re going to love our new light-bulbs.

Just try not to break ’em, OK?

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (8)

3000!

July 9, 2011 – 1:14 pm

We’ve just watched the 37-year-old Derek Jeter launch his 3000th career hit (that’s a pretty big deal in these parts, and Gotham has been on pins and needles for weeks). Jeter’s never worn any uniform other than the pin-stripes, so all of those hits were for the Yankees — and to add a spectacular touch, the historic blow was a home run (only his third of the year).

Yes, yes, mere frivolity, perhaps — but a nice diversion from the doom and gloom all around us. That’s what sports are for.

I wonder who’s got that ball!

By Malcolm | Posted in Sport | Comments (8)

Tweet This!

July 7, 2011 – 4:39 pm

As you probably know, President Obama hosted a Q&A session on Twitter yesterday. The acerbic blogger Iowahawk presented a list of questions, none of which were presented to POTUS, which is a shame, because some of them are awfully good.

Go and read them here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Take An Umbrella

July 7, 2011 – 12:30 pm

Here’s a striking image of that enormous storm on Saturn.

(Al Gore was unavailable for comment.)

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Assembly Of God

July 6, 2011 – 11:09 pm

Boffins at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have made a nifty find: an animal that’s screwed together. (Just like we’re all going to be.)

Have a look here.

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

Potpourri

July 5, 2011 – 9:17 pm

Well, we’ve just got back to the city after a very long day’s drive, and things will be getting back to normal here shortly.

For tonight, just a couple of links:

First, as the debt-limit deadline looms, you might enjoy this series of essays by Arthur Laffer on taxation.

And here’s an item from Dennis Mangan informing us that the whole idea that antioxidants are good for you — which has been the prevailing view for an awfully long time, and which has made a lot of people a lot of money — might well be a bunch of hooey.

Last, something that might get you thinking about some of life’s persistent questions, or just leave you staring into your beer: a photo gallery from Tampa, Florida.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (23)

Happy 4th!

July 4, 2011 – 11:59 am

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

Poll

July 2, 2011 – 4:12 pm

OK, everybody, setting aside our usual topics, here’s a question for you all:

What’s the greatest album of all time? (I originally wrote “rock album”, but let’s just make it “album”.) You only get to pick one.

All readers, even the most casual visitors, and all of you who usually stay on the sidelines, are invited to comment on this one.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording, Society and Culture | Comments (50)

Recess

July 1, 2011 – 10:27 pm

We’re tuning out for the long weekend; I’m sure the world will manage to keep on going straight to hell without us for a couple of days.

Thanks as always for visiting, and please feel free to browse our endlessly fascinating archives, or to give the View a Random Post link a whirl.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Mt. Washmore

June 30, 2011 – 11:14 am

Who says immigrants can’t assimilate?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

Wonk Like An Egyptian

June 30, 2011 – 11:04 am

On January 28th, as the ground was shifting in Egypt, our crack strategic-analysis team here at waka waka waka saw a critical opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood, and predicted that the Ikhwan would step smartly into the breach. We wrote:

Nature abhors a vacuum, and although the newspapers have so far reported that religious groups appear not to have played much part in the uprising, anyone who has paid any attention to Egypt’s modern history will know that the principal opponent of the secular Egyptian dictatorship is, and has always been, the Muslim Brotherhood ”” the patient, hydra-headed global Islamist organization (its front groups include Hamas in Gaza, and CAIR in the US) that has been awaiting its chance in Egypt for decades (and which of course has never forgotten the execution of its chief political theorist, Sayyid Qutb, by Nasser in 1966).

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan’) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners ”” for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence ”” as a “moderate’ Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach’ to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost’ mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering’) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see ”” in fact we should be astonished not to see ”” the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

At the time, this aroused skeptical indignation in some of our readers. However, five months having passed, we note this item in today’s news:

U.S. recognizes Muslim Brotherhood

As Philip K. Dick said: “Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (6)

They Go Mad In Herds

June 29, 2011 – 1:39 pm

With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a heretical item from the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, William Happer, on a topic we’ve taken up in these pages from time to time.

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

This Just In

June 29, 2011 – 10:00 am

Well, here’s a shocker. Whoever could have imagined such a thing?

Are the Wealthiest Countries the Smartest Countries?

Actually, what’s shocking is not so much the rediscovery of the obvious truth that human capital matters — but that the story has actually been picked up by the press (it’s all over the place this morning).

Expect some push-back. This is the sort of thing, after all, that has implications.

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

All Or Nothing, Then Nothing

June 29, 2011 – 9:42 am

I haven’t said much of anything about the passage of the gay-marriage bill; I haven’t really had a dog (or a God) in that particular fight. I have gay friends and I’m happy for them, but I also see it as a relatively benign symptom of a much larger process: an ever-expanding radical anti-discrimination in Western culture that, because it is ideologically absolutist, has taken the form of a lethal auto-immune disease.

Lawrence Auster makes this point very well indeed this morning:

It is sort of an ultimate proof that the concept of equality cannot be kept within rational and sane limits, as American conservatives have always believed it can be. Once equality becomes the ruling political and moral principle of a society, it will proceed over time, notwithstanding all objections to the contrary, to demand the equalization of everything. Thus that supreme statement of classical liberalism in its American incarnation, the Declaration of Independence, with its idea of an inherent equality of rights among human beings, has evolved over time into a radical egalitarian doctrine of equality of results among all human beings and the destruction of all distinctions, including the very distinctions upon which the rights were originally based. The limited idea of equality that moved the Founders, that no man by birth should be better than another under law or custom, has evolved into the cultural-Marxist idea that nothing is better than anything else.

Thus, according to the emergent understanding, to say that marriage is by definition and through all of human history between a man and a woman, is to say that marriage between a man and a woman is better than “marriage” between two people of the same sex and thus should be allowed while the latter should not be allowed. And such a position is anti-equality and therefore immoral and invalid.

Ultimately equality swallows itself, since liberals reject the idea that equality as defined by the American tradition is better than, say, Islamic law. Islam, the antithesis and mortal enemy of our tradition, must be treated as equally true and valid as our tradition, leading to the destruction of our tradition along with all of its ideas of equality, whether the classical liberal equality of rights or the modern liberal equality of sexual choice.

It is questionable whether conservatives can do anything to stop this mad progress of liberal logic to ultimate destruction. Perhaps the best we can do is continue to point out the truth about liberalism and offer an alternative vision of society, so that when the liberal system finally crashes, or when it crashes in the conscience of each individual liberal, there will be a non-liberal alternative for liberals to turn to.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (23)

Five Feet High And Risin’

June 28, 2011 – 2:32 pm

Today brings another provocative essay by Victor Davis Hanson, this time on the hypocrisy of socialist elites. (I know I’ve been reposting a lot of VDH lately, but he’s been on rather a tear, I think.)

Excerpts:

This discussion is, of course, a belabored example of why and how socialists do not like socialism. Indeed, statism is not a desired outcome, but rather more a strategy for obtaining power or winning acclaim as one of the caring, by offering the narcotic of promising millions something free at the expense of others who must be seen as culpable and obligated to fund it ”” entitlements fueled by someone else’s money that enfeebled the state, but in the process extended power, influence, and money to a technocratic class of overseers who are exempt from the very system that they have advocated.

Is it true that “statism is not a desired outcome”? Well, desired by whom? The masses, or the elites? Sooner or later, when the bill comes due, even the proletariat realizes that socialism’s way of achieving equality — by beating down and taking from whatever or whoever stands too tall — just leads to an equal sharing of misery. The only way that sort of radical equality can be maintained is through a corresponding inequality of power between the masses and the elites (as discussed at length in posts, and linked posts, here and here) — and so, for the elites, statism can be a very desirable arrangement indeed, at least as long as one’s position is secure (generally an interval of finite duration).

So what is socialism? It is a sort of modern version of Louis XV’s “AprÁ¨s moi, le déluge’ ”“ an unsustainable Ponzi scheme in which elite overseers, for the duration of their own lives, enjoy power, influence, and gratuities by implementing a system that destroys the sort of wealth for others that they depend upon for themselves.

As noted above. But until the Ponzi game collapses and the floodwaters rise, everbody’s in, not just the elites:

Once the individual develops a dependency on food stamps, free medical care, subsidized housing, all sorts of disability or unemployment compensation, education credits, grants, and zero-interest loans ”” the entire American version of the European socialist breadbasket ”” then expectations for far more always keep rising, with a commensurate plethora of new justifications, usually in the realm of someone else having more than the recipient, always unjustly so. The endangered aid recipient is always seen as being pushed off a cliff in a wheel chair ”” therefore, “they’ can afford to give “me’ more; things are not “fair’; there is no “equality.’

“Equality”: the gift that keeps on giving.

Cutting back $2,500 a month in combined benefits and subsidies to $2300 a month is always seen as far more heartless and cruel than not in the first place giving someone without subsidies a mere $200 a month. For every dollar taken, two are demanded. And that creates a powerful constituency for whom the shrillest rhetoric of oppression is, well, never too shrill. Revolutions are not fueled by the very poor seeking their daily bread, but by those on entitlements that revolt at the thought of less to come. A rioting Greek today is far better off than his parents in 1973 when I first arrived in the country; and he would remain far better off even under an “austerity’ plan. But his expectations have soared geometrically with each euro received, and he now has convinced himself that not to have more is to have nothing.

History is not kind to such collective states of mind. Pay an Athenian in the fifth century BC a subsidy to go to the theater; and in the fourth century BC he is demanding such pay to vote in the assembly as well ”” and there is not to be a third century free democratic polis. Extend to a Roman in the first century BC a small grain dole, and by the late first century AD he cannot live without a big dole, free entertainment in a huge new Coliseum, and disbursements of free coined money. Let the emperor Justinian try cutting back the bloated bureaucracy in sixth century AD Constantinople and he wins the Nika riots that almost destroy a civilization from within even as it is beset by hosts of foreign enemies.

Social Security started out as a few dollars a month to the elderly, in their last two or three years of life, to ensure that they could feed themselves without the indignity of borrowing from their children. It has morphed into someone living well for twenty years on far more money taken than was put in ”” or a young family with a dyslexic child on “disability’ for life. To cut any for the latter would cause far more riot and mayhem than not to have given the former anything in the first place ”” despite the fact that the 21st century recipient was far less needy and got far more than the early 20th century recipient who needed more and got less.

What stops socialism?

Oooh, I know, I know!! (waving hand in air)

— Reactionary blog posts?

I fear bankruptcy alone.

Oh.

Well, we’ll soon have a chance to find out.

Who are socialists?

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone else’s money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles and power for themselves ”” in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable spending. When this latest attempt at statism is over, Barack Obama will enjoy a sort of Clintonism, a globe-trotting post officium lifestyle of multimillion dollar honoraria to fund a lifestyle analogous to “two Americas’ John Edwards, “earth in the balance’ Al Gore, a tax-exempt yachting John Kerry, a revolving-door Citibank grandee like Peter Orszag, or a socialist Strauss-Kahn in $20,000 suits doling out billions to the “poor.’

That is just the way it has been and will always be.

Not entirely correct, I think: there are plenty of other sorts of socialists out there, including a great many who have no illusions of ascending to robber-baron lifestyles, but who simply feel themselves on the outside of the charmed circle: unable, or constitutionally disinclined, to rise even to comfortable mediocrity by their own efforts in a free society. What Dr. Hanson describes just above is greed, and lust for power, which does a good job of accounting for the Kerries and Gores and Strauss-Kahns of the world — but he overlooks a more widespread, and historically far more formidable, force, the same one that “Theodore Dalrymple” focused on in his recent presentation: resentment.

Read the rest here.

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

Ceteris Paribus

June 27, 2011 – 10:20 pm

Anthony Daniels, who writes as “Theodore Dalrymple”, gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, in Bodrum, Turkey. (The P.F.S. looks like an interesting outfit, by the way, if you have libertarian sympathies, and for this meeting they fielded an impressive lineup of speakers.)

In Dr. Daniels’s address he proposed a little “thought experiment”:

Let us suppose that one wanted, for whatever reason, to erect or create a society in which a bureaucratic government arrogated to itself ever-more power to regulate and control a population, but to do so without the more obvious accoutrements of a tyranny, indeed to do it with the consent and even at the request of the population itself. The espousal of what kind of ideal would be propitious to the erection or creation of such a society?

What impossible dream, what chimerical aim, desired by all but impossible to achieve, would do the job? What hoped-for change could keep us happily chasing rainbows from generation to generation, all the while surrendering more and more of our liberty and property to a monstrous and ever-expanding State?

It’s not hard to think of possibilities here, and plenty are already in play. Controlling the climate is one. The elimination of various “achievement gaps” is another. Improving strength and harmony through Diversity is yet another.

Dr. Daniels’s choice? One that you might not have thought of as eternally beyond our reach: equality of opportunity.

I trust it will be obvious by now that equality of opportunity is precisely such an ideal. The very impossibility of it, the very fact that it is a mirage that recedes as one tries to approach it as it shimmers in the distance, is an advantage, not a disadvantage: for the failure to attain the goal justifies ever-greater and more vigorous attempts to do so. Moreover, it is clear that the nature of the goal itself justifies interference in the lives of citizens down to the very last detail; for there is literally nothing that anyone can do in the bosom of his family that does not affect the life-chances of his children, or those of other children by comparison with his. And the greater the failure of each successive politico-bureaucratic interference, the greater the locus standi for yet further interference. This is a world in which nothing succeeds like failure.

Of course we all will agree that there is much, in coarse terms, that a society can and should do to make opportunity more equal — and of course much has already been done, from the abolition of slavery, through the Civil Rights movement, to various feminist reforms of more recent decades, and so on. But the point is that if the goal is absolute — not just improved equality of opportunity, but complete equality of opportunity — it is also impossible, and so becomes a perfect foundation for totalitarianism. Big Brother had East Asia to war against in perpetuity; we can have inequality. Either will do.

See if you think he makes his case. Transcript and video here.

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

Feets Of Fury

June 27, 2011 – 4:28 pm

In case you’ve never seen it, here’s some of the best martial-arts choreography ever filmed: Jackie Chan and Ken Lo giving it hell in Drunken Master II.

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts | Comments (2)

Time To Go

June 26, 2011 – 1:40 pm

There’s a good deal of disagreement out there about whether we should be getting out of Afghanistan. The prospects are bad either way.

A while back, after I’d finally emerged from the herd-minded and thoughtless liberalism of my youth, I became sympathetic to neoconservative optimism about remaking the world in America’s image. I imagined right along with the neocons that the blessings of our modern Western civilization were desired by all people everywhere, and that the scaffolding upon which America was erected was universally adaptable.

Well, having devoted much of the last ten years to reading history, attending carefully to the national debate, and studying Islam, my views have, as they say, ‘evolved’, and I’d no longer describe myself as anything resembling a neocon. In particular, I’m thoroughly convinced that our nation-building projects in tribal Muslim snake-pits are a fool’s errand, however worthy our motive — and that to waste ourselves in such noble folly is a luxury we no longer can afford, if indeed we ever could. As Mark Steyn reminds us, we no longer prosecute wars with the aim of “winning” — and our foreign policy, like our immigration policy, has twisted itself into a bizarre syndrome combining guilty self-abnegation with limitless global commitment. (Indeed, Anglo-European civilization as a whole — the extraordinary creative force that brought into existence the modern world, and that is still essential for its maintenance — seems nowadays like a new member of AA, sheepishly “making amends”, far less concerned about advancing its native people’s interests than about atoning for them.)

We simply can’t carry on like this any more.

John Derbyshire summed up well enough in his weekly podcast on Friday:

In the beginning, Afghanistan was a punitive expedition ”” fully justified, since the government of the country had offered friendly hospitality to a group that planned the 9/11 attacks on us. With 10,000 troops we took down the government, chased them into the back country, killed a lot of them and broke their stuff. Mission accomplished. If we had left at that point the Taliban would soon have come back, but with a new attitude to harboring American enemies. Or if not, another six month campaign, another ten thousand guys, lather, rinse, repeat until they got the message.

Instead we got those ten years, those half trillion dollars, those sixteen hundred lives. What a stupid waste.

Admittedly, some knowledgeable parties say that we’ve been making “real progress”, and I don’t doubt that in many ways we have. But our progress in Afghanistan is the sort of progress you might make bailing seawater out of a hole you’ve dug at the beach. Unless we want to work that God-forsaken hole forever, at ruinous expense, we need to go.

But what about our “sunk costs”? Given that we’ve invested so deeply in this mission, and that so many have sacrificed so much — how can we not “stay the course”?

Rather than answer that question myself, I’ll leave you with a little story from Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson:

A Transcaucasian Kurd (a nomadic Moslem living in Kurdistan) once set foot out of his village to do some business in a neighboring town. On the way, he noticed in the marketplace a fruiterer’s shop displaying handsomely arranged fruit, among which was one “fruit”, the color and form of which particularly took the Kurd’s fancy. Although he had almost no money with him, upon inquiring about the price of the beautiful “fruit”, he found it was not at all expensive, and so he was able, with his last two cents, to buy a whole pound.

Later in the day, having concluded his business in the nearby town, and on his way home by foot at sunset, he sat down by the side of the road and took from his provision bag some bread and the attractive “fruit” and began to eat. But — horror of horrors — very soon everything inside of him began to burn. But in spite of this he kept eating.

In time, there came along the same road a fellow villager who, seeing that the face of the Kurd was aflame, that his eyes were streaming with tears, and that in spite of this he continued to eat what were in reality red pepper pods, the villager said to him: “What are you doing, you Jericho jackass? You’ll be burnt alive! Stop eating that extraordinary product, so unaccustomed for your nature.”

But the Kurd replied: “No, for nothing on Earth will I stop. Did I not pay my last two cents for them? Even if my soul departs from my body I shall still go on eating!”

Whereupon the resolute Kurd ”” it must of course be assumed that he was such ”” did not stop but continued eating his red pepper pods.

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

Noah’s Arc

June 25, 2011 – 8:46 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Wednesday’s Child

June 25, 2011 – 12:17 pm

Our friend The Stiletto has linked to a sad and instructive item, by the daughter of the feminist icon Alice Walker. The Stiletto excerpts the following passages:

[M]y mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale. ”¦

My mother’s feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn’t even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her. ”¦

Ironically, my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa – offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities – after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

According to the strident feminist ideology of the Seventies, women were sisters first, and my mother chose to see me as a sister rather than a daughter. From the age of 13, I spent days at a time alone while my mother retreated to her writing studio – some 100 miles away. I was left with money to buy my own meals and lived on a diet of fast food. ”¦

I was very lonely and, with my mother’s knowledge, started having sex at 13. I guess it was a relief for my mother as it meant I was less demanding. And she felt that being sexually active was empowering for me because it meant I was in control of my body. ”¦

As a child, I was terribly confused, because while I was being fed a strong feminist message, I actually yearned for a traditional mother. My father’s second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on.

There was always food in the fridge and she did all the things my mother didn’t, such as attending their school events, taking endless photos and telling her children at every opportunity how wonderful they were.

My mother was the polar opposite. She never came to a single school event, she didn’t buy me any clothes, she didn’t even help me buy my first bra – a friend was paid to go shopping with me.

The Stiletto concludes:

Rebecca Walker says “I my own woman and I have discovered what really matters – a happy family.’ She is the mother of 3½-year old son Tenzin and has been trying to give him a sibling for the past two years, but realizes she discovered the joys of motherhood too late to make a second pregnancy easily achievable.

I haven’t linked over to The Stiletto’s place often enough lately, but her blog — conservative commentary from a spirited female perspective — is excellent, and entertaining too. For a link to the rest of the Rebecca Walker interview, and much more, do pay her a visit.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Anti-War Movement

June 24, 2011 – 3:06 pm

Here, for once, is a sensible piece of legislation. It has no chance of passing.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)

Funk Break

June 24, 2011 – 1:38 pm

If you’re going to be in Gotham on Saturday, July 30th, you should get yourself over to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Bandshell (conveniently located just 250 yards from waka waka waka‘s New York command center) for what bids fair to be an outstanding evening’s entertainment.

The headliner, Malcolm Rebennack Jr. (A.K.A “Dr. John“), is a national treasure, and needs no introduction. The opening act, however, is someone you may not have heard of, unless you’re a fan of the Washington, D.C. musical subgenre known as “go-go”: the unspeakably funky Chuck Brown, now 74 years old.

I was fortunate enough to do some recording work with Chuck Brown back in 1985, and together we confected a bouncy little single called “Sho Yuh Right”. (I found out later that producer Maxx Kidd had listed me on the credits as “The Mighty Malcolm”, which pleased me no end.) You can enjoy it here.

(Technical note: this track contains high levels of what is known, in the arcane patois of the trained music-biz professional, as “stank”.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Cartoon Anatomy

June 23, 2011 – 2:34 pm

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (0)