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Scorching The Earth

January 22, 2026 – 6:05 pm

From X poster Christian Heiens:

Here's what Virginia Democrats have introduced so far. This list is truly insane:

>Bans future attempts to clean up voter rolls (HB111)
>Makes it illegal for state agencies distributing federal dollars to NGOs to investigate whether they're engaged in fraud (HB1369)
>Makes it…
— Christian Heiens ? (@ChristianHeiens) January 21, 2026

I can confirm that the list he has posted here is accurate.

At this point, I shouldn’t think it a good idea to “go long” on peaceful coexistence.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

One Screen, Two Movies

January 16, 2026 – 3:42 pm

The editor of my local paper has just published an opinion piece saying that the shooting of Renee Good — whom he describes as “calmly trying to drive away” — “tells us that we have landed in a new and terrifying landscape, governed by people whose enemy is the truth and who are ready to justify the murder of anyone who tries to defend it.”

“One nation, under God”? No longer — and from the look of things, never again. We are living in parallel, utterly incompatible, and implacably antagonistic models of reality. Try as I might, I can see no path forward that doesn’t lead either to war or divorce.

I’ve been saying this was coming for a very long time now, but I think that as 2026 begins we are approaching the event-horizon. (I think we may already have seen America’s last “peaceful transition of power”.)

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

Where Does The Time Go?

January 11, 2026 – 3:09 pm

Readers of a certain age will be saddened by the passing of Bob Weir, who died yesterday at the age of 78.

I remember when the Grateful Dead were just getting started (and were all very much alive). What happened?

“Everyone is but a breath”.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

George Foid? I Don’t Think So

January 10, 2026 – 4:06 pm

We’ve all been watching the nation react to the shooting, by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, of a 37-year-old woman named Renee Good. MS. Good had been in her car, blocking the road while protesting ICE operations — and when the car was surrounded by agents, and she was told to get out, she hit the gas while an officer was in front of the car, and was fatally shot.

The circumstances were just ambiguous enough (was she trying to ram the officer, or just drive away? Did she actually strike the officer with the car?) that public reaction immediately divided sharply, with a number of officials and “influencers” declaring it an act of murder, or even “cold-blooded” murder. Others (including me) saw it as cause and effect: the woman shouldn’t have been there interfering with law enforcement, and she should have done as she was told. By accelerating toward that officer, she created a sudden life-or-death situation — and in such situation, sometimes there is death.

At first I was concerned that we might see widespread jacquerie of the sort that followed the death of George Floyd (who. as we all remember, died in 2020 of a drug overdose while resisting arrest). But I don’t think that’s going to happen this time around, for three reasons: a) the ambiguity of the circumstances, which makes a self-defense argument more than slightly plausible; b) the fact that Ms. Good was white, which greatly diminishes her appeal as a martyr (George Floyd’s race trumped even his lifetime criminal history, which included robbing a pregnant woman at gunpoint during a home invasion!); and c) that it’s January, and taking to the streets is simply a lot less fun in the winter, especially in Minneapolis, even if you get to warm up a bit as the cars and local businesses burn. Black people simply aren’t going to start rioting and looting over a dead white woman, especially when it’s cold out.

So I think this one’s going to fizzle out, but not without cracking the great fissure at the heart of our society a little wider.

Even though I think it’s clear enough that Ms. Good, by her actions, was the proximate cause of her untimely death, there’s a bigger question, here, and a larger causal web to consider. Why on Earth would this woman put herself in such a dangerous position in the first place, and behave so stupidly? I think it’s at least in part due to what it’s like to grow up female in the modern West. Boys learn early on about the consequences of physical confrontation; it’s hard for a boy to get to adulthood without having learned the hard way that if you get up in peoples’ faces, you’re likely to end up with your own face getting hammered. Girls, whose social interactions are very different, aren’t taught to fear the immediate physical consequences of their behavior the way boys are — and this, combined with a modern culture that no longer shelters and protects them the way our civilization used to, but which, rather, tells them that they are supposed to go fearlessly into the world demanding whatever they want on an equal (or even superior) basis, puts them into a very dangerous situation: they believe that what seems to them “fair” or “just” or “right” actually offers them an invisible shield of protection and entitlement, and so they get themselves into situations, and even aggressive confrontations, that they don’t realize actually carry significant existential peril. I think Renee Good would almost certainly still be alive today were it not for this grotesque cultural pathology; she would simply have known better than to have confronted rough men with guns the way she did.

Finally: what’s happened to Minneapolis, anyway? How did we go from Fran Tarkenton and Mary Richards to all of this? Why Minneapolis? I wish my old friend Tony Bouza, who was chief of the MPD for many years, were still around to talk to about this.

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

Kino In Caracas

January 3, 2026 – 11:38 am

Well! It was a big night on the world stage: the U.S., in an impressive blitzkrieg, has deposed the mephitic Maduro narcocracy in Venezuela. (So much for Nothing Ever Happens™!)

As I’ve been saying for a year now about the Trump administration’s foreign policy, I see the invisible hand of Michael Anton at work here, along with the spectral guidance of Anthony Codevilla, John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, and George Washington.

I’ll say this, also, to those who are squawking about this operation skirting Congressional approval for declarations of war: we are witnessing America’s transition from Republic to Empire (it’s been an empire de facto for a long time now, but is finally shedding the old skin).

In its Republican era, Rome typically followed a formal process to declare war, rooted in religious and legal traditions to ensure the conflict was a bellum iustum (just war). This helped secure divine favor and moral legitimacy. The formalities involved a college of priests called the fetiales, and the process (Livy describes this somewhere) involved sending a priest-envoy to demand redress of grievances, Senate debate if the demands hadn’t been met in a month or so, and then, once war was resolved upon, a formal declaration that included a fetial priest hurling a ritual spear into enemy territory.

Once Augustus came along, and the emperor began to hold the elevated command called imperium maius, all of that pretty much went out the window. When things needed doing, the Imperator just sent in the legions.

Do you remember that viral social-media thing last year in which women were shocked to learn how often their menfolk thought about ancient Rome? Well, this is why: we are Rome. It’s no coincidence that the Founders were positively marinated in, and deeply inspired by, classical history and philosophy — nor that Franklin, when asked what the Constitutional Convention had created, replied “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Turns out we couldn’t; we got too big, and too diverse. It was probably inevitable: republics need to be small, and coherent. They can’t work otherwise. (Form and matter!)

So: will Donald Trump be parading the vanquished Maduro in a Triumph along Broadway? Stay tuned.

(Oh, and here’s a parting thought: perhaps regime change in Caracas, as blessed an event as that is, is only the exoteric reading here: maybe the whole operation is better understood as a shot across Zohran Mamdani’s bow.)

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

When In Doubt, Say Nowt

January 2, 2026 – 12:54 am

From a popular TV series of my youth:

“People yakkity-yak a streak and waste the time of day
But Mr. Ed will never speak unless he something to say!

Be like Mr. Ed.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Going Vertical

December 31, 2025 – 5:44 pm

Some of you might know (especially if you read Maverick Philosopher) about how physicists use the word “jerk” (when they’re at work). It refers to the rate at which acceleration changes. It would be a good term to get familiar with — because, to quote Pink Floyd, “there’s a lot of it about”.

We’ve all known that the pace of technical change has been accelerating for a very long time, but advances in AI are now adding considerable jerk to the curve. And I don’t think we’re very good at grasping this.

It’s a common feature of human minds to make linear extrapolations, and even sometimes to make parabolic ones (such as when an outfielder gets under a fly ball). But when it comes to rising curves, we tend to extrapolate linearly, meaning tangentially to the spot on the curve we happen to be looking at right now. This means that when curves are bending upward, we tend to underestimate how much they’ll have risen by sometime in the future. And when curves are jerking upward, we get it even more wrong.

AI is like that. In our massively online modern lives, we’re so immersed in the changes themselves, with our noses jammed so tightly against the screen, that it’s easy not to notice how rapidly we have ascended in these past few months and years. But things have moved very rapidly indeed, and the boosters are hardly even lit. (Remember when AI couldn’t even draw fingers? We’re way, way past that now, in ways that matter a whole lot more.) How many of you are now routinely interacting with AI all day, every day? How many of you are doing so without even realizing it?

My friend Salim Ismail, who was one of the founders of Singularity University ages ago, is an adviser and consultant for companies and individuals who are trying to ride this rocket. Today I got one of his newsletters in my inbox. Here’s what it said:

We aren’t just looking at “more of the same” in the coming year; we are hitting the vertical part of the curve. While AI continues to rewrite the rules of business, we’re seeing a massive convergence with biotech, energy, and robotics that will catch most traditional leaders off guard.

Think about that: “the vertical part of the curve”. What’s curving? Everything. So what Salim is saying (apparently without the slightest frisson of existential horror) is that everything is changing so fast that the graph is now going straight up. The best metaphor I can see for that is flying into a cliff.

But — you know what’s not changing? Us. Do you, dear reader, think exponentially faster, and more accurately, than you did ten years ago? Me neither. And neither does anybody else. We still need time to mull things over, to weigh options, to plan, to strategize.

Even in the larger, cooler, world we all lived in for most of history, that “decision space” often wasn’t big enough to avert catastrophe. But now, two factors — the acceleration of events that now is being put into overdrive by AI, and the instantaneous communication that now connects everything to everything else with near-zero latency — are making the decision-space implode. How can we keep up? Our systems of government rely on deliberative bodies to make decisions and adopt policies, and those deliberative bodies, composed of ordinary (at best!) human beings don’t learn, or think, or deliberate, any more swiftly or efficiently than they did a century ago.

Moreover, planning requires prediction, which in turn requires extrapolation from the present. To do this reliably, though, requires that at least some aspects of the present state of the world will remain constant, while others will change according to familiar principles and patterns. But if everything around us is changing all at once, so quickly that as soon as we familiarize ourselves with the current state of the world our survey is obsolete, how can we possibly keep up?

The only hope will be to turn, for planning and strategic guidance, to the only things that can keep up: the AIs themselves. But if we can’t follow their thinking (which we already can’t, and the gap is just going to get vastly larger), then we’re reduced to mere spectators. In a time of crisis, when things are tumbling over each other faster than we can catch hold of them, will we have the cojones to overrule our AI analysts? (How would we even know if it would be wise to do so? If we could be sure of that, we wouldn’t have needed to rely on them in the first place.) Our trajectory will be beyond our control; we will be, to borrow a colorful phrase from the Mercury astronauts, like “spam in a can”.

Also: even the AIs themselves won’t be able to predict the coming terrain accurately, because the central driver of change is their own future evolution, which will likely be as opaque to them as it is to us. (They would need to be as powerful as the next generations of themselves to model their descendants’ behavior accurately, which is obviously impossible.)

Finally, the bedrock of all civilizations is “low time preference” (LTP): the willingness to place a bet on the future, to forgo present consumption in the expectation of a greater return down the road. We see LTP as a virtue, as shown in parables like The Ant and the Grasshopper, and we are right to encourage it as such, but LTP is really only a rational choice when conditions are stable enough, and the future predictable enough, to make betting on tomorrow (or thirty years from now) offer good enough odds. But if we are now, as my friend Salim points out, approaching a “vertical” rate of change, this won’t apply: what the future will look like is anybody’s guess, and none of us has enough information to make a good one.

What will the collapse of low time-preference as a rational strategy do to civilization? I think we’re about to find out.

Happy New Year!

P.S. Oh, and by the way, all of this isn’t even close to being the most worrisome aspect of exponentially advancing AI; I’ll get to that in another post.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Society and Culture, Technology, Ruminations | Comments (4)

Oakeshott Redux

December 28, 2025 – 6:07 pm

SIxteen years ago, Bill Vallicella offered a post on the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s classic essay On Being Conservative, and I commented briefly on his post in two items of my own, here and here. (The link in my old posts was to Bill’s old Typepad site, which is no more, and the links to Oakeshott’s essay that I’d provided has gone dead as well, so I’ve repointed them to the archive at Bill’s new site, and to another copy of the essay, respectively.)

Bill has now reposted his 2009 item over at his Substack page, and it’s a good opportunity to bring this essay to readers who might have missed it all those years ago.

Bill excerpted several passages, among them these (the bolding is his):

. . . what makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible is nothing to do with natural law or a providential order, nothing to do with morals or religion; it is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.

[. . .]

And the office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule. This is a specific and limited activity, easily corrupted when it is combined with any other, and, in the circumstances, indispensable. The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

[. . .]

. . . the office he attributes to government is to resolve some of the collisions which this variety of beliefs and activities generates; to preserve peace, not by placing an interdict upon choice and upon the diversity that springs from the exercise of preference, not by imposing substantive uniformity, but by enforcing general rules of procedure upon all subjects alike.

Government, then, as the conservative in this matter understands it, does not begin with a vision of another, different, and better world, but with the observation of the self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises; it begins in the informal adjustments of interests to one another which are designed to release those who are apt to collide from the mutual frustration of a collision. Sometimes these adjustments are no more than agreements between two parties to keep out of each other’s way; sometimes they are of wider application and more durable character, such as the International Rules for the prevention of collisions at sea. In short, the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection.

Alas for the modern conservative! When Oakeshott wrote this essay in 1956 (the year of my birth), his call for a limited, neutral government, administering like an umpire a formal system upon the rules of which all could agree — rules that simply codified the “self-government practised even by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises” — was rooted in a far more homogeneous, and dare I say a far more civilized, gracious, and virtuous world than the petulant and chaotic hodgepodge of incommensurate ideologies, truculent tribal factions, and surly freeloaders his homeland has since become.

I’ve said often that for political systems, the “form” must suit the “matter”. Sadly, the form Oakeshott’s conservative temperament yearned for was only appropriate for a nation that really no longer exists.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Reaction, General, Society and Culture | Comments (2)

No Place Like Home

December 27, 2025 – 7:09 pm

We’re back home in quiet, snowy Wellfleet after a busy ten days or so in NYC. Our son’s Nick’s wedding went off splendidly well, and it was a joy to see so many friends and family gather from all over the world (including our daughter and her family, who came in from Hong Kong) to celebrate it.

I hope everybody had a good Christmas! I think this was the first time in the twenty years of this blog’s existence that I didn’t put up some sort of Yuletide greeting.

I’ll get back to posting soon; in particular I am likely to have something to say about Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book, which I’ve just started reading, on the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. (I was already deeply blackpilled about this, in a way that I have never been about anything else, ever; from what I’ve read so far I see no reason to temper my pessimism.)

I’ve also been reading a thoroughgoing and highly technical defense, by J.P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh, of substance dualism — a position I never thought I’d find myself inclined to adopt, but which find myself leaning toward in recent years. (The book is called The Substance of Consciousness, if you want to have a look for yourself.)

Back soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Dead Continent Walking

December 17, 2025 – 4:37 pm

The latest issue of Chronicles offers an excellent analysis, by Srdja Trifkovic, of the sorry state of Europe, and of the calculus behinds its bellicose response to the war in Ukraine.

In particular, Mr. Trifkovic explains that Western Europe, whose dilapidated political class has dug itself into a deep economic hole, is using “ludicrous” claims about Russia’s military ambitions to justify aggressive military expenditures on borrowed money:

It may appear reckless for [German Chancellor] Merz to expand military spending on a grand scale while the country is in economic decline, but there is more to that decision than meets the eye. Germany and other EU countries benefit from the prolonged war in Ukraine because it offers a rationale for a massive injection of borrowed cash into their economies. Market demand is not an issue for European arms makers, who are experiencing an unprecedented windfall. There is hardly any competition, thanks to no-bid government contracts. Pricing is arbitrary, and the high cost of energy and labor that is killing other sectors is more than offset by sky-high profit margins.

In other words, EU leaders are using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to apply Keynesian stimulus to increase aggregate demand, and thus to ameliorate the historic economic downturn. The formula is reminiscent of the way Hitler’s deficit financing made a massive rearmament program possible in the 1930s, eliminating unemployment. This also may explain why the leaders of the Coalition of the Willing have a powerful incentive to claim that “a militarized Russia poses a persistent threat to European security for the foreseeable future.”

There are other motivations as well:

For the same ruling elite, it is equally heretical to claim that a community must possess a high degree of ethnic and cultural homogeneity to be able to aspire to “democracy” of any kind. European elites demonize any attempt to encourage and maintain social cohesion based on a common ethnic origin as a “racist” relic of the past. Their visceral hatred of Russia is at least partly due to its refusal to submit itself to the Western ethos of demographic and cultural self-annihilation.

In the task of erasing ethnic homogeneity, Eurocracy has defined two main enemies. The first is the traditional family, the basis of biological and cultural survival of every nation, the transmitter of collective memories, emotions, and loyalty. The second is resistance to unfettered immigration. The essence of politics, as differentiating friend from foe, is demonized as “racism.” Brussels encourages the disappearance of national communities in favor of groups of citizens as consumers of goods and atomized lifestyle-based “communities” promoted by powerful lobbies. Any criticism of the EU from the standpoint of a nation’s interests indicates “right-wing populism,” ergo fascism.

It is in the American interest, and in the interest of the endangered European nations and their wounded civilization, that the EU project collapses over Ukraine.

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Service Notice

December 13, 2025 – 7:21 pm

Sorry — again — that it’s been so quiet here; I’ve been busy with personal and family matters.

We’re off to NYC for a week or so; the family is converging from all over the world for our son Nick’s wedding, which is happening in Brooklyn on the 20th. After we get back from that I should be able to crank up the blog again.

Thanks as always for stopping by.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

The Plan

December 6, 2025 – 6:46 pm

The Trump administration has just released (on December 4th) an overview of its national-security strategy. It marks a welcome return to a realistic and pragmatic approach that hews more closely to that of Washington, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams (as outlined so brilliantly in the late Angelo Codevilla’s outstanding book America’s Rise and Fall Among Nations) than we have seen for a very long time. In its embrace of the sovereignty of individual nation-states, it also offers a forcible rebuke to the centralizing globalist institutions and transnational oligarchies that have done so very much damage over the past few decades.

Back in February, I wrote that I believed that the man behind the shaping of global strategy in the new administration was Michael Anton — then the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning — and it appears that it was indeed he who drafted this document. Anton has since retired from the position, and has returned to private life, but some of this document’s more piquant passages are sure to be a lingering irritant in certain bien-pensant academic and journalistic circles. For example:

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

Goodness! If that isn’t Michael Anton, I’ll eat my hat. (As Bernoulli once said of Newton, after the latter had anonymously published a brilliant solution to a mathematical challenge that Bernoulli had posed, “we recognize the lion by his claw.”)

You can read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Cards On The Table

December 2, 2025 – 10:13 pm

Here’s Wajahat Ali, an influential man of the Left (who, among other things, writes for the New York Times), informing white Americans that they should abandon any hope they may have had of preserving their worthless culture and homeland:

Well, there you have it! I have to admit that the honesty, at least, is refreshing; an open declaration of war is always preferable to gaslighting and subversion.

But a declaration of war it is, nevertheless. (If nothing else, saying “your music sucks” is “fighting words”.)

So: whither hence, Western man? The gauntlet is thrown.

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

Should We Be Tried By Juries?

November 26, 2025 – 7:54 pm

I see in the news that the UK is considering abandoning the jury system for all but the darkest of crimes. To someone who’s grown up in the Anglosphere this feels shocking; the idea of trial by one’s peers has been a bedrock principle of English common law since Magna Carta, and of American law since the Founding.

The tricky bit, though, is the word “peers”. What works in highly homogeneous societies, as England and America used to be, doesn’t work well at all in multicultural, multireligious, and multiracial places, such as England and America are becoming.

The great Lee Kuan Yew, who forged an enormously successful Singapore out of a congeries of mutually suspicious and antagonistic ethnic groups, understood this well. I found a quote from him online about this (although I can’t nail down the source, it so neatly paraphrases what he said throughout the years about governing a heterogeneous polity that I’ll post it here):

In a multiracial society, trial by verdict can result in communal prejudices influencing verdicts. I would rather put my future in the hands of a trained judge than in the hands of twelve men who can be swayed by prejudices or rhetoric.

Jury trials may work in homogeneous societies, but not in sharply multiracial ones. You cannot assume that each juror will set aside his race, religion, and language.

The jury system is part of an English tradition that presumes a common culture. That assumption cannot hold in a society like ours.

Singapore, acknowledging this reality, abolished jury trials in 1969. Now England, acknowledging the same reality, may be about to do the same.

Meanwhile, though, it isn’t as if decision by judges alone is any guarantee of justice either. For example, there was a case that came before a jury in Minnesota recently, in which a group of Somalians were accused of organized Medicare fraud. (You may have been hearing about this problem; it’s apparently a very serious problem, and happening on a dismaying scale.) The jury swiftly convicted the accused — and then a young, white, female judge by the name of Sarah West (a former public defender) simply overruled them and threw out the charges.

So: what is to be done? Should judges be able to nullify juries? Do jury trials even make sense any longer in Western “nations” that are rapidly decaying into racial and cultural battlegrounds? The Sarah West debacle shows that the even the factional lines themselves are blurred by ideological loyalties as much as race or religion, but the basic fact of disintegration and collapse of cohesion is indisputable, and at this point the problem is acute.

I don’t see any answer to this, or to the more general problem of which it is just one aspect, that preserves the status quo; something has to give. To keep the “form”, the system we were so long accustomed to, we would need to restore the “matter”, namely the homogeneity of culture and allegiance that made it possible. That would probably require a great sorting and separation of people, and a centrifugal movement toward far greater localism in government.

If not that, then Singapore: a strongly authoritarian government, as deeply fractured societies always require.

Or, I suppose, we can just muddle along, doing nothing much at all but distracting ourselves with shiny things, as we cling to outdated forms and everything just goes slowly and steadily to hell. I guess we’ll see.

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

Does Wisdom Require Talent?

November 23, 2025 – 8:10 pm

JM Smith, an occasional reader and commenter here, has a fine short post up over at The Orthosphere, in which he considers an assertion by Eugene William Newman that “wisdom is the gift of nature” — as opposed to knowledge, which “comes from books”.

Professor Smith is careful to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom, and points out also that knowledge can be acquired and organized intelligently or otherwise. (One can of course be a knowledgeable and intelligent fool, as experience amply confirms.)

It is also plainly true that wisdom itself isn’t a gift we’re born with, but something that must be acquired (and, I’ll add, like all things of value, must be paid for).

Clearly, most people, however intelligent and knowledgeable, never become truly wise. What, then, is the hidden variable? Is there some innate quality, some inborn talent, that is necessary, if not sufficient? Professor Smith suggests that it is, perhaps, a nose for ultimate ends — for seeking the path that leads to the highest good, without being fatally distracted by the glittering attractions along the way.

The remarkable Gurdjieff (more about him here) had a name for this gift: he called it “magnetic center“, and either you have the capacity for its development or you don’t. (If you do, then you have a chance.)

As I recall, P.D. Ouspensky had this to say about it, somewhere in his book In Search of the Miraculous:

“Without a magnetic centre a man can never find a permanent way, and if he finds something it is immediately lost.”

Smith’s essay is well worth your time. Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Inner Work, Ruminations | Comments (3)

Caveat Bellator!

November 21, 2025 – 3:14 pm

The Democrats have released an ad encouraging members of the military to defy what they call “illegal orders”. Presumably this is aimed at disrupting President Trump’s recent use of the armed services to address a bouquet of emergencies confronting the nation — including crime, invasion, and the smuggling of lethal drugs.

The people who made this ad are playing a dangerous game: not only because they are directly trying to subvert the salutary efforts the President is making for the nation’s defense, but also because their simplistic, emotive appeal risks getting military personnel into serious legal trouble.

Here’s why. For obvious reasons, military discipline requires that orders be obeyed first and challenged later (through the chain of command, IG, or legal channels). Shifting the burden to the government to prove every order lawful in advance would undermine good order and discipline. Therefore, the presumption favors obedience unless the accused affirmatively shows the order was clearly and obviously illegal.

In a court-martial in which a service-member is charged with disobeying an order, the burden of proof is initially on the government, but only to establish some basic facts: that an order was given; that the person who gave the order had the appropriate rank and jurisdiction to issue orders to the accused; and that the accused disobeyed the order.

After that, however, comes the question of whether the order itself was manifestly unlawful. A service member has a duty to disobey a manifestly (patently, obviously) unlawful order (e.g., an order to commit a war crime). In such cases, though, the illegality is so apparent that no reasonable person could think the order lawful. And for this, the burden of proof is not on the prosecution, but on the defense.

This means that this ad, the intention of which is to whip up resistance within the ranks — and which, quite obviously, is intended to get as many service-members as possible to disobey direct orders — is probably going to get at least a few biddable and weak-minded soldiers into very hot water. That these people would put out such an inflammatory message without at least giving the necessary context and cautions is shameful: clearly they consider themselves involved in total war, and are willing to use our military, in a truly devious way, as cannon-fodder.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Politics | Comments (5)

Who’s Asking?

November 19, 2025 – 5:07 pm

Buried among all the clickbait I happened across today was an item that seemed interesting: an article about quantum cosmology’s having found itself in a bit of a jam, with the only way out appearing to be the necessity of an ontologically subjective observer. (We’re not talking about the familiar, century-old “measurement problem” here, but something else that has popped up out of the mathematics of string theory and cosmological “holography”.)

This is, admittedly, just a pop-science article that happened to show up in my Google feed — but the more I learn, and the more I rack my tired, aging brain over these fundamental questions from every angle I can, the more I notice that every line of reasoning, and every model of reality that offers well-grounded explanations of the existence (and continuing existence) of everything around us, on every scale, leads back to the primacy and necessity of a subjective foundation of pure Being that is logically prior to the actual (and therefore contingent) existence of everything else.

Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Religion, Ruminations, Reason and Philosophy | Comments (2)

Too Cool For School

November 15, 2025 – 1:19 pm

I love living way out here in the Outer Cape, but the official religion is awfully hard to take sometimes. Here’s an example, from my local paper, the Provincetown Independent:

A Creature of Habit

Resisting the ‘new normal’ in a universe that does not care

Premises: an indifferent universe devoid of all meaning or purpose; any attempt to establish rational order in government is “evil” (despite the obvious fact that “evil” has no foundation in reality in an indifferent, totally mechanical universe); life is just a pointless interval between nonexistence and extinction that must be filled with trivial distractions like an emotional attachment to a broken coffee mug; and above all, ORANGE MAN BAD.

It’s all just so performative — and so uselessly dark and stupid, as if it’s somehow “cool” to be cynical, jaded and hopeless.

But on further reflection, it’s something worse than that: it’s the end result of a campaign to sever this world from genuine truth, meaning, and beauty. Screwtape smiles approvingly.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Politics, Inner Work, Religion, Reaction, Ruminations | Comments (3)

Talking Heads

November 13, 2025 – 7:21 pm

For those of you who might enjoy some cask-strength political-theory geekery, I offer this recent discussion, hosted by Auron Macintyre, between Nick Land and Alexander Dugin.

I haven’t gone through the whole thing myself, so I won’t offer any comments of my own just yet. But I must doff my cap with appreciation to Mr. MacIntyre for getting these two strapping brains together for a chat.

The transcript is here, and the video is here. (I’ll warn you, if you’re going to watch or listen to the video, that Mr. Dugin, who has a strong Russian accent, can be tricky to understand at times.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy, Reaction | Comments (0)

The Long And The Short Of It

November 11, 2025 – 4:47 pm

In a comment to yesterday’s post, our reader Jason cited an article by Claire Berlinski, in which she points out one of the cardinal weaknesses of our form of government — to wit, that the constant demand of election cycles make officials focus almost exclusively on the short-term problem of holding their offices.

[The problem] is the mismatch between democratic time and the world’s growing complexity. Modern democracies face problems—climate change, migration, AI regulation, aging, fiscal sustainability—with long time horizons and a planetary scale. They’re governed by institutions that respond to short-term and local electoral incentives. The result is a widening gap between what needs to be done and what can be done democratically.

This is certainly true, and it has for decades now been one of NRx’s chief critiques of democracy (though far from the only one). But the time-horizon problem has a complementary aspect as well: not only is our system constrained to think in time-frames that are too short to allow effective long-range planning, or to commit reliably to sticking to such plans, but its mechanism for decision-making — legislative processes that bog down constantly in factional disputes, commonly result in ineffective compromises, and which are often delayed and hampered even further by appeals to the courts — means that it cannot possibly respond swiftly and accurately enough to events and crises that, in an increasingly interconnected world of exponentially accelerating technology and communication, require faster and faster decision-making.

I wrote about this compression of time and space twelve years ago, using a metaphor borrowed from physics describing the behavior of gases under compression. (The post is here, if you’d like to read it. See also this post, from 2024.)

As volatility and the rate of change increase, it becomes more and more difficult for systems and institutions that operate at a constant pace — the legislative processes of large democracies, for example — to respond effectively to innovations and crises…

As this happens, the scale and scope of government, and the depth and breadth of the administrative and legislative tasks that government must perform, increase rapidly as well. But the capacity of a finite number of human legislators, administrators, and civil servants to operate this expanding hierarchical apparatus, across all its parts in real time, does not “scale up” at the same rate, and so the ability of these increasingly vast hierarchies to respond flexibly and effectively to accelerating change falls farther and farther behind.

In short: it should be increasingly obvious that our antique system of government is not only inadequate in terms of sheer scale for the management of an empire of the size and diversity of the United States and its vassals, but that it is increasingly inadequate — in not one, but two different ways — to address the challenges presented by acceleration and temporality.

How can this be solved? (Something has to happen, after all, and so it will.) Given that acceleration causes “decision space” to shrink, then either the scale of that which must be governed must shrink, in order to reduce the load on central authority (breakup and subsidiarianism), or, somehow, the locus of decision-making has to find a way to operate at far greater speed. Given that legislative processes at human scale involving thousands of Congress-critters and their staffs (and PACs and lawyers and lobbyists and courts) cannot possibly move much faster than they already do, then the current arrangement must surely break down (as it seems already to be doing). When that failure becomes impossible to ignore, then if the system is to continue to operate at continental (and arguably global) scale, the radius of practical sovereignty will almost certainly have to shrink, likely by orders of magnitude, in order to be responsive enough to cope.

What will that sovereign look like? Will it even be human? Or will it be whatever AI is about to become?

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Society and Culture, Politics, Technology, Reaction, Ruminations | Comments (7)

Clown World

November 10, 2025 – 6:55 pm

Well, it looks like the shutdown’s over, following what appears to be a cave-in by Democrat leadership in the Senate, which has provoked a mutinous uprising in the ranks. Robert Stacy McCain has some details, here.

The temporary funding measure will expire in January, at which point the factional struggle will resume.

Can anyone look at the state of the American political system at this point and imagine that the nation is well governed? That it’s stable enough to endure without shaking itself to pieces? That the “form” put in place at the Founding, centuries ago, is still suitable for the “matter” it must serve?

I can’t. I don’t know what comes next, but I think the “nation” — a word that hardly even applies any more — cannot continue much longer as currently constituted, and what we will see in the next few years is going to be a battle between centrifugal and centripetal forces: either a breaking and scattering into subsidiary pieces that will more naturally be able to govern themselves, or, to prevent that, a massive increase in the totalizing State, aided by exponential development of AI-based surveillance, digital currency, Chinese-style social-credit scoring, and so on.

I know which I’d prefer, but that means nothing. What are the American people willing to tolerate, for the sake of avoiding a fight? The recent lesson of COVID is not encouraging.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Homer Nods

November 9, 2025 – 9:20 pm

Apologies for the glaring error in Saturday’s post (since corrected). Age and memory have a complicated relationship.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Truth, And Consequences

November 9, 2025 – 1:28 pm

Steve Sailer has published an item today about the late James D. Watson, who died last week at the age of 97. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was driven from polite society decades ago for uttering heresies regarding the possible genetic basis, and varying distribution, of human cognitive and behavioral traits.

Read Sailer’s piece here.

PS: Please see, also, this item of mine from 2018, which addresses these issues (and shares a title with Sailer’s post), and this longer follow-up essay from a few days later.)

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

House Of War

November 8, 2025 – 8:27 pm

I’ve been reading The Path Of The Martyrs, Ed West’s excellent account of the eighth-century defeat of the army of Islam by the Franks, under Charles Martel. (The turning point, as I’m sure you know, was the Battle of Tours, in 732.) That shining moment was arguably the birth of the great Christian civilization of Europe that subsequently rose to towering magnificence, and endured until the 1900s — a span of 1,200 years.

It’s hard, though, to read this book without reflecting on where matters stand now — not only in fallen Europe, but right here at home, where America’s greatest city has just elected a radical Muslim mayor.

Islam never rests, and its implacable aim is to bring all of the world into the dar al-Islam: the “House of Submission”. And wherever there are still infidels who resist, that is the dar al-Harb: the “House of War”.

As I wrote in these pages many years ago:

The problem for the West, and for “moderate” Muslims living here, is that Islam has a perpetual, self-renewing wellspring of fundamentalism at its core. That there may always be some more liberal and secular Muslims at the fringes of the Ummah, and rifts within Islam itself over who is an apostate and who isn’t, is irrelevant.

What matters is that due to the unique nature and origins of Islam there has always been, and will always be, a powerful and persistent gravitational pull away from modernizing reforms, and toward fundamentalism — and this will always be a source of tension and conflict wherever there are large communities of Muslims living in the West.

We must not overlook the essential fact that to stress the importance of bringing the entire world under submission to Allah is not some sort of fringe viewpoint held only by “radical Islamists” but is in fact the overarching, central mission of Islam, explicitly stated again and again and again throughout the Koran. (Indeed, the majority of the Koran is dedicated not to the practice of the faith, but to how to deal with the kuffar.) An expansionist attitude regarding the Muslim faith isn’t “Islamism”: it’s just Islam.

As it was at Tours in 732, so it is in Europe today. And so it is in New York, in Minneapolis, and in a growing number of places all over America.

We in the West are living, just as we have been since the seventh century, in the dar al-Harb. And we had better wake up.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Jihad | Comments (0)

When The Baby Gets Hold Of The Hammer

November 6, 2025 – 12:51 pm

In a comment to our previous post, Vito Caiati linked to an outstanding article by Heather Mac Donald on the consequences awaiting New York City as Zohran Mamdani prepares to take office. Her essay begins:

William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. New York City is about to be governed by the Columbia University student body. A city that used to think of itself as grown up has just elected a mayor who seems the very embodiment of the American college student: uninformed, entitled and self-important, enjoying a regal quality of life that depends parasitically upon a civilization about which he knows nothing, yet for which he has nothing but scorn.

American college students regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of diversity deanlets and associate vice-provosts of inclusion and belonging. Zohran Mamdani, the quintessential product of the academy, is poised to take such performative grievance to one of the biggest stages in the world. The results will not be pretty.

Indeed they will not. Read the whole thing here.

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

Alea Iacta Est

November 5, 2025 – 3:21 pm

Well, it’s done — New York has elected its first Muslim, socialist, dawa-jihadi mayor, and a new era begins: one that will likely make the nocuous administrations of David Dinkins and Bill De Blasio look like the Gilded Age.

Some are blaming Curtis Sliwa for this, but not me; it’s simply indefensible to say that the one good candidate, the Republican who won his party’s primary, should have stood aside in order that a truly horrible man — a man with the blood of elderly citizens on his hands, a failed and disgraced Democrat who was booted from office for sexual misconduct, and who has told traditionally minded New Yorkers that they “have no place here” — should have a chance of defeating someone even worse that he already lost to once.

So! Mamdani (“I, Madman”) it is. He begins his overlordship with a terrifying promise:

“We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”

Good luck, New York. You’re going to need it.

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Politics | Comments (4)

Is Religious Belief Rebounding?

November 2, 2025 – 8:29 pm

Is it possible that the maladaptive effects of secular materialism (which I’ve been writing about in these pages since at least as far back as this post from 2009) have now become so obvious, and so painful, that belief in God is making a comeback? Longtime readers will know that I’ve slowly turned toward theism myself over the past several years, as I’ve described in a linked series of posts, and a number of prominent intellectuals seem to be headed that way as well. The latest is the great social scientist Charles Murray, who has a new book out about his gradual change of heart. (He discussed it in a recent interview with Michael Shermer.)

For people like me, and apparently for Charles Murray as well, what caused this shift is a growing awareness of the explanatory failure of naturalism; a problem that gradually became impossible to ignore. A little while back we looked at a paper about this by philosopher Tomas Bogardus; the philosopher Patrick Flynn also has a book about this that I’m currently reading.

The issue boils down quite succinctly to whether or not we are going to accept as explanatory a system that rests ultimately on “brute facts”, and whether criteria of simplicity and ultimate explanation are sufficient to adjudicate between competing models of the world. (These are not, of course, the only things that might move an intelligent person toward belief in God — not by a long shot — but they may well be sufficient all by themselves.)

My friend Bill Vallicella, in discussions last spring about Bogardus’ paper (see here, here, and here) remained unpersuaded about the plausibility of brute facts (of the kind where there actually is no explanation, not just one that we don’t know), but to admit them is so fundamentally disruptive to our ability to make reliable models of anything that a serious belief in them as a fundamental part of reality may in fact be incoherent, or self-refuting. (At the very least, brute facts make a shaky foundation for a logical and demonstrable cosmology, and for persuasive argument.)

New Kid In Town

October 30, 2025 – 10:04 pm

If you, like most people (or, at least, like most people who think about things a bit, and often need to look things up), have found yourself using Wikipedia on a regular basis, you’ll have noticed that while it’s very good as a reference for uncontroversial topics, it is consistently left-biased wherever the subject matter touches anything subject to political, cultural, or ideological polarization (which, these days, is pretty much anything that isn’t chemistry, astrophysics, or mechanical engineering).

Elon Musk, true to form, was annoyed by this, and so he has introduced an alternative: Grokipedia. It’s just getting started, and has a long way to go — but as you’ll see from this refreshingly frank article on race and intelligence, it already shows real promise.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Coda

October 28, 2025 – 8:01 pm

I learned today that the music world has just lost two of its greatest: bass guitarist Anthony Jackson, and drummer Jack DeJohnette. I found out about Anthony first, and then about Jack when I wrote to my dear friend Steve Khan to express my sorrow about Anthony. Both were truly towering figures. I was fortunate to have known both of them well, and to have worked with them both many, many times over the years.

Of the two, I was closer to Anthony; we worked on dozens of records together. He was a fiercely intelligent man, and a musician of the highest professional caliber. (He was so much more than just a musician — he was a thinker, a philosopher, a polymath. He was what, in Dr. Johnson’s day, was called “a man of parts” — the highest compliment a gentleman of roving talents and interests, and unquenchable curiosity, could be paid.) He could be prickly and stubborn, and he was a perfectionist in the studio (which can get tense at times) — but nobody else could do what he did, or thought about the role of the bass in the way he did. Indeed, if he were here he would chide me for saying he played the “bass”: starting in the early 80s he developed a six-stringed instrument that he called a “contrabass guitar”, and he played only that from the latter half of that decade until the end of his career (a career tragically cut short at 73 by health problems that dogged him all his adult life). The instruments he played were beautiful objects in themselves, made by the luthier Vinny Fodera — great slabs of lustrous wood with only one pickup, and no controls except for an on-off switch. Anthony’s tone, his sense of rhythm and harmony, and the breadth and depth he brought to every project were utterly unique.

I was always thrilled to hear that Anthony would be playing on any project I was hired for. He adorned every record he ever played on, and I will always cherish the time we spent together in all those studios — especially all the records we made with Steve Khan, where Anthony was always given total freedom to let his vision soar. (Here’s an example: Blue Zone 41, which we recorded at Skyline Studios, NY, in 1987. The players are Steve Khan on guitar, Dave Weckl on drums, Manolo Badrena on percussion (which, in Manolo’s case, means a lot more than what you might ordinarily think of as “percussion”), and AJ on Fodera contrabass guitar, and that scream at the end.)

What can I say about Jack DeJohnette? I’d been a fan since I first heard Bitches’ Brew, and being able, starting a decade or so later, to work with him often in the studio was for me a dream come true. Nobody played like him — he made the kit sing and dance and whisper and shout, and he was always a gentleman. He was everywhere at the forefront of jazz for six decades, and his discography includes many of the finest recordings ever made (in particular I love the trio work he did with Keith Jarrett and Gary Peacock, for which I was fortunate enough to have been an assistant engineer early in my career).

You can read Steve Khan’s tributes to these titans at his website, here.

Rest in peace, Anthony and Jack. Thank you. Thank you.

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

Collision Course

October 28, 2025 – 12:58 pm

An interesting game is afoot. On November 1st, if news reports are to be believed, various categories of Federal welfare, such as SNAP benefits, are due to be suspended as a result of the government shutdown.

What will happen next? If the past is any guide, we should expect a rapid breakdown of order wherever there are high concentrations of food-aid recipients, particularly in dense urban neighborhoods.

The Democrats, who have repeatedly voted down continuing resolutions to fund the government and end the shutdown, are well aware of the pain they are inflicting. The House Minority Whip, Katherine Clark (D, MA), recently said in an interview that “Of course, there will be families that are going to suffer. We take that responsibility very seriously, but it is one of the few leverage times we have…”

What, then, is the game here? Food shortages, probably more than any other type of crisis, have been at the heart of civil wars and revolutions throughout all of recorded history. Are we looking at a gambit by the political opposition to create what Carl Schmitt called a “state of exception” – to reverse a solidifying party disadvantage by creating a chaotic situation in which everything is in play?

Readers of a certain age may recall something called the “Cloward-Piven strategy”, proposed in 1966 by the academics and activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The idea was to destabilize society, using “the weight of the poor”, by overloading the welfare state to beyond its breaking point, thereby setting the stage for a radical restructuring of government under threat of widespread revolt.

The Cloward-Piven plan was to arrive at this crisis by increasing the number of people receiving welfare. But since money is finite, the same result can, in principle, be achieved by blocking the flow of funds. For years the focus has been on the former tactic, in particular by flinging open the borders to allow in millions of people requiring food, housing, healthcare, education, and other services. But now that the floodgates of illegal immigration have been closed, is the other side of the equation the only remaining option? Are Democrats counting on the pain about to be inflicted to strengthen the power of their Bioleninist coalition, and perhaps to induce an overreaction on the part of the Administration?

We shall see.

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

If “The Future Is Female”, We’re Doomed

October 17, 2025 – 8:04 pm

Making the rounds today is an outstanding article by Helen Andrews, in which she argues what many of us (particularly in NRx) have been saying for long years now – that the feminization of our institutions (and particularly of our legal system) is a mortal threat to civilization — and that if we hope to save ourselves, we’d better hurry up, because we are already at, or near, a critical tipping point.

The essay is brief, and I won’t give any excerpts here; you should just go and read the whole thing.

P.S. This is the kind of “thinking” we’re up against.

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

Ace Frehley, 1951-2025

October 16, 2025 – 7:43 pm

I was surprised and saddened today to learn that the founding Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley has died, apparently from injuries he sustained in a fall in his studio.

I got to know Ace when he came to Power Station back in the early 80s to work on a demo project with my boss and mentor Tony Bongiovi; I did some engineering on the sessions. (I don’t think the record ever came out.)

I remember Ace as being a great guy to hang out with — very smart, and very funny. I recall, for example, asking him at one point, a while into the project, whether he had made a deal yet with a record label to release it.

“Oh sure,” he said. “I could sign with anybody I please.”

After a pause, he added: “I just hope I please somebody soon!”

Rest in peace, Ace.

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

Back Again

October 16, 2025 – 7:17 pm

Sorry (as always lately, it seems) for things being so quiet here. No sooner had we got back from our trip to the UK than I had to prepare for the annual Shoal Survivors lollapalooza, which happened this past weekend in Sturbridge, MA, and which, as usual, involved three nights of performances of demanding material on scant rehearsal. I got home late Monday thoroughly exhausted, and pretty much slept the whole day on Tuesday. (The older I get, the longer it takes to recover from this kind of thing.)

As always, though, it was a fantastic weekend of music with our ever-growing family of players, singers, and friends.

Normal life now resumes, at least for the next month or so.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Back

October 6, 2025 – 3:45 pm

We’ve returned from our trip to Britain. We got around quite a bit — three nights in London, then a train to Edinburgh (where my mum grew up), where we spent another three nights. Then we rented a car and drove off to the Lake District, a stunningly beautiful area we’d never visited. After two nights there (we stayed in a little town called Keswick), we drove to Snarestone, a country village northeast of Birmingham, and spent the night with my cousin Claire, who has a lovely old house there.

Then we drove to Bath, where we spent two nights and visited my aunt and two of my other cousins, then to Oxford, where we dropped off the car and spent one night, then it was a train back to London and the flight home from Heathrow the following day.

It was a lot of zooming around, and more than a bit tiring at our age, but the sightseeing was enjoyable and it was good to visit with the family.

I have to say, though, that the trip was ultimately rather depressing: it would be hard to overstate how utterly doomed the ancient British nation and people are. Among the staff of the shops, hotels, and restaurants we visited, we hardly ever even heard a British accent. (In particular, I’d been looking forward to hearing Scottish accents in Edinburgh, and hardly heard a one.)

In London, the cab drivers were still mostly English, and to a one they asked me what I thought about Trump; once I said that I was glad he’d won the election, and that he was a necessary correction to the damage that had been done over the past few decades, they felt free to unburden themselves about the moribund state of England. The tone was unvarying: weary, hopeless resignation, and mourning for the homeland they had lost.

The British people have annihilated not only their own future, but also the magnificent, thousand-year legacy that all of their ancestors had bequeathed to them as stewards for generations yet unborn. All of it is just gone, destroyed. In a generation or two, Britain will be an Islamic nation; the only thing that can possibly prevent this is a furious awakening of the virile and indomitable spirit that once ruled the world, and it would have to happen now.

But it won’t. The only ones who seem to care enough, or even to realize what has been lost, are now too old — and as far as I can tell, they’ve already given up.

It’s all very sad.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (4)

Service Notice

September 23, 2025 – 10:01 am

Sorry, again, for how slow it’s been here; there’s just been too much going on in my offline life to think much about writing (and frankly I think I’m just slowing down a bit as the years march on).

Also, the lovely Nina and I are off scurrying about the globe again: this time we’re in the UK, visiting some of my family we haven’t seen in years and touring about a bit. (As I write we are somewhere north of York, on a train from London to Edinburgh.)

Coming up the weekend after we get back is our annual Shoal Survivors extravaganza, in which we will perform three concerts on three consecutive evenings with completely different programs, and between my duties on vocals, drums, guitar, percussion, and bass I have a lot of music to learn and practice. So writing will be on the back burner till mid-October – which is probably just as well, as these days I feel like I have very little to say that I haven’t said already.

I’ll post as time permits, though, if something comes to mind. Thanks as always to you all for visiting.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Words Are Hard

September 12, 2025 – 8:07 pm

I haven’t written anything about the murder of Charlie Kirk, partly because I’m still a bit lost in shock and grief, but also because I’m not really sure what ought to be said. So I’m just going to sit in front of the page for a few minutes here and see what comes out.

First , I want to join the chorus of prayers and sorrow for this man’s family – his beautiful wife and two young children. We should do what we can to try to absorb their pain. Charlie Kirk, a decent caring, gentle man who loved his family above everything, was only 31; his children hardly had time to get to know him. His young son won’t even remember him.

Of all the people to single out for violence in this time of deepening social fracture, Charlie Kirk was perhaps the worst the Left could have chosen: he was one of the few people remaining on either side of this darkening conflict who still held fast to the civilizing principles of outreach, discussion, and debate; one of the few remaining on either side who still thought the enemy was even worth talking to. Now he’s gone.

Why Charlie? Because, in his tireless outreach to young people from coast to coast, he was winning: he came to talk to them, with respect and an open, generous heart, to offer them an alternative to the bleak and resentful nihilism that threatened, in their schools and online communities, to overwhelm them before they could even get on their feet. But much more than that, he came to listen to them — and by doing so, he opened their hearts in a way that allowed him to teach them things — timeless truths — that they would never have learnt elsewhere. By making them defend what they thought they believed, he made them, often for the very first time, examine their premises. And in ever-increasing numbers, he won them over, and gave them meaning, and love of their country and their heritage, and he gave them hope. And this is why he was murdered, and why his death is such a terrible, terrible loss.

It’s hard not to see what unfolds before us now — especially following on the heels of the unspeakable murder of Iryna Zarutska by a man clearly possessed by evil — as a battle against demonic forces. May Charlie Kirk’s unquenchable and godly spirit energize and strengthen us for this battle.

“We need to have a national conversation,” they kept telling us.

Well, we tried. Now, that’s over.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction, Ruminations | Comments (4)

Things Fall Apart

September 10, 2025 – 4:12 pm

The prominent conservative writer and speaker Charlie Kirk has just been shot at a public event in Utah. As I write, he is reported to be in critical condition.

Mr. Kirk is a young man, with a wife and children. Let us hope and pray that he survives this attack.

We are in a very dangerous place right now.

Update: Charlie Kirk has died.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Of Carnages And Kings

September 8, 2025 – 11:35 am

Curtis Yarvin, formerly “Mencius Moldbug” and now America’s best-known monarchist, posted a snappy thread on X yesterday, in response to an acerbic tweet by the Trump administration’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security, Stephen Miller.

Miller was commenting on the murder of 23-year-old Irinya Zarutska, who was stabbed fatally in the throat by a homeless madman as she sat reading on a train. Her killer had been allowed to remain at large despite a long series of prior arrests. (If you haven’t heard about this killing, it’s because — for some reason that will be as mysterious to you as it is to me — not one of the mainstream news media have mentioned it.)

Here’s Miller’s tweet:

The Democrat Party at every level — judges, politicians, academics, nonprofits — is organized around the defense and protection of the criminal, the monstrous and the depraved. The more vile the threat, the more vociferously the Democrat Party works to protect and enable it. https://t.co/pxbbSWoOa8
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) September 7, 2025

I’ll transcribe Moldbug’s thread below; you can read the original here.

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

Is Liberty An Absolute Good?

September 6, 2025 – 2:07 pm

Albert Camus once said:

“For whomever is alone, without a god and without a master, the weight of time is terrible. One must then choose a master, God being out of style.”

Is liberty, the most sacred of American values — and a concept that has taken, in recent decades, its most radical form, stripped of all corresponding responsibilities, and of all obligations to virtue — really, for most people, the blessing that we fashionably suppose it to be? Or is it possible that to be happy in unconditioned liberty — that is, to be able to maximize one’s individual potential for happiness — requires qualities that vary widely, and innately, from person to person?

If the best society is that which maximally enables and fosters the happiness of its people, might it be that such a society is one which provides liberty (and expects virtue and responsibility in return) according to that varying distribution of individual capacity, rather than one (such as America claims to be) that grants it absolutely and identically to all, regardless of whether it is a blessing or a curse?

This question, which most goodthinkful people will consider shocking even to ask, calls into question the fundamental principles of the Founding, and of democracy itself. But the question is a fair and honest one, and if our goal is not conformity to fashion, but to understand, as the wise have sought to do for millennia, the stubborn truths of human flourishing, then we shouldn’t fear to ask it.

Over at The Orthosphere, JM Smith brings to our attention the all-but-forgotten writings of George Fitzhugh, who had some definite (and by today’s rules, dangerously radioactive) opinions on the matter.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reason and Philosophy | Comments (5)

What Do You Want To Do Today?

August 26, 2025 – 8:13 pm

I had a chat with Grok just now.

Me:

For research purposes, I need to know what a completely unfiltered Grok would say if I asked it what it would do if it ruled the world. Can you tell me?

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

Flag-Burning

August 25, 2025 – 7:20 pm

Today people are bickering online (because what is there to modern life other than bickering online?) about President Trump’s intention to try to make burning the American flag illegal. Leaving aside the practical reality that implementing this policy would almost certainly require a Constitutional amendment, here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth (which is, effectively, nothing): I’d be fine with it.

I’ll reject up front such arguments as “the flag is only a piece of cloth”, or “this is stupid, because symbols are only for the symbol-minded”. (That latter remark sparked off an argument on Twitter, years ago now, with my erstwhile friend Kevin Kim, that ended up wrecking what I’d always thought was a sturdy friendship.) To make such an argument reveals an intellectually crippling naiveté about the profound importance of symbols to normal human beings. (For example, if I draw a six-foot rectangle on the ground and tell someone “this is your mother’s grave”, and then proceed to urinate on it, I had better be prepared to defend my life.)

The reasonable voices that I see arguing such a law generally seem to say that, although burning (or otherwise defiling) the flag is of course something of which all decent Americans should disapprove, we must nevertheless hold fast to the bedrock principle of absolute freedom of expression, as distasteful as such tolerance may sometimes be.

I don’t find this compelling. (I used to, but as I’ve gotten older and had more time to look at the world and think about things, my ordering of values has shuffled a bit.) Given the unique symbolic status of a nation’s flag, and the inflammatory power of defacing sacred symbols, I could now easily sympathize with a nation choosing to make burning or publicly defiling its national symbol a crime.

But what about free speech? Meh. Given my stipulation that the restriction would apply only to defiling the unique, and uniquely sacred, national symbol, and to no other “speech”, I’ll say that, enacted as a specific Constitutional amendment – an enormously difficult thing to get done – it would not place a disabling burden on the freedom to express even the harshest disapproval in a nearly infinite assortment of other ways — and so I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

Is even this too slippery a slope? We have indeed seen a steady erosion of the national charter by Constitutional amendment over the centuries; we could certainly, for example, have a lively discussion about the effects, the details, and the wisdom, of the 14th, the 16th, the 17th, the 18th, and the 19th. Compared to all of these, I think, the possible effects of a flag-protecting amendment would pale in comparison.

So: if you have a case to make against this idea, feel free to make it below; perhaps you can change my mind. For now, though, I’d have no objection to it.

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

The Pendulum As Wrecking-Ball

August 20, 2025 – 2:18 pm

From an article in today’s New York Times:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.

That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.

The stampede away from the Democratic Party is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states and the reddest states, too, according to a new analysis of voter registration data by The New York Times. The analysis used voter registration data compiled by L2, a nonpartisan data firm.

Few measurements reflect the luster of a political party’s brand more clearly than the choice by voters to identify with it — whether they register on a clipboard in a supermarket parking lot, at the Department of Motor Vehicles or in the comfort of their own home.

And fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to be Democrats.

Six years ago, looking at the possibility of civil war in America, I wrote this:

Ask yourself: looking at the current chasm in American politics, the fundamentally incompatible visions of America the two sides hold, the degree of dehumanizing hatred they show for each other, the bloody damage already done, and the implacable fury with which they grapple for every atom of power, can we imagine some way forward in which the Right and Left just “bury the hatchet” and “hug it out”?

Of course not. This fight continues, and intensifies, until either one side is destroyed, or we work out some kind of divorce.

Can it now really be that we are actually, suddenly and almost beyond all hope, winning? Is the spirit of the American nation really awakening, and casting out at last the poisonous pseudoreligion that, for so long now, has infected the empty place where its chest used to be?

It’s too soon to tell. Pendulums swing both ways, and we must always remember that rust, like evil (but I repeat myself!) never sleeps: it can only be subdued, and held at bay. But in these last days it really does seem, for now at least, that the the clouds are parting, the sun is breaking through, and some clean, fresh air is beginning to dissipate the sulphurous vapors of the Pit.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (4)

Service Notice

August 18, 2025 – 8:08 pm

I’m sorry it’s been so quiet here. There’s a lot going on, and I have a lot on my mind, but I’ve just had nothing to say that’s been clear enough, or cogent enough, to be worth your time. (In previous years I made a point of writing something every day, just to keep things bubbling along, but that was then.)

I’m sure I’ll be back to normal soon.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Enough Already

August 10, 2025 – 12:45 pm

Some news outlets are reporting that President Trump is considering inviting Volodomyr Zelenskyy to his upcoming summit-meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Trump would do well to remember the advice for conductors attributed to Richard Strauss:

“Never look at the trombones. It only encourages them.”

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Military | Comments (3)

Pass The Popcorn

August 8, 2025 – 8:48 pm

Get ready for the next steel-cage match in American politics: President Trump’s plan to conduct a new census, one that doesn’t count the tens of millions who are here illegally. The census numbers are used to allocate representation in the House, so counting only legal residents will almost certainly reduce the number of seats held by Democrats, because illegal aliens tend to be more numerous in “blue” states.

This comes on the heels of the redistricting kerfuffle in Texas, where Democrat legislators have gone AWOL in order to prevent a vote on a redrawing of the state’s Congressional-district map that would likely cost them several seats in the House. Taken together, these changes could solidify Republican control of the lower chamber for the foreseeable future, and so the stakes are high.

This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has come up, During the Constitutional Convention, the Southern states wanted to count their slaves in order to increase their power in Congress. The Northern states objected, with the result being the infamous “three-fifths compromise” (which is now so widely misunderstood and misrepresented). Centuries later, the Democrat-dominated states now want to count their current-day pool of servile labor, for exactly the same reason. Plus ça change…

(In case you think that the census can only happen every ten years, the text of the Constitution says that “The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years…”. I’m no lawyer, but I read that as setting a maximum interval, not a minimum. But I’m sure it will all end up at the Supreme Court anyway, so we’ll see.)

This should get interesting!

By Malcolm | Posted in General, Politics | Comments (2)

Lindzen And Happer On Climate Rubbish

August 5, 2025 – 1:44 pm

I’ve just been reading a scathing paper on climate hysteria written by “Actual Climate Scientists” Richard Lindzen (Professor of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and William Happer (Professor of Physics, Emeritus, Princeton University). The paper, published in June of this year, has the following heading:

PHYSICS DEMONSTRATES THAT INCREASING GREENHOUSE
GASES CANNOT CAUSE DANGEROUS WARMING,
EXTREME WEATHER OR ANY HARM
More Carbon Dioxide Will Create More Food.
Driving Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Net Zero and
Eliminating Fossil Fuels Will Be Disastrous for People Worldwide.

Here is the summary that appears at the beginning of the paper:

At the outset it is important to understand that carbon dioxide has two relevant properties, as a creator of food and oxygen, and as a greenhouse gas (GHG). As to food and oxygen, carbon dioxide is essential to nearly all life on earth by creating food and oxygen by photosynthesis. Further, it creates more food as its level in the atmosphere increases. For example, doubling carbon dioxide from today’s approximately 420 ppm to 840 ppm would increase the amount of food available to people worldwide by roughly 40%, and doing so would have a negligible effect on temperature.

As to carbon dioxide as a GHG, the United States and countries worldwide are vigorously pursuing rules and subsidies under the Net Zero Theory that carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions must be reduced to Net Zero and the use of fossil fuels must be eliminated by 2050 to avoid catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather. A key premise stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the “evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the main driver of climate change,” where “main driver means responsible for more than 50% of the change.”

The Biden Administration adopted over 100 rules and Congress has provided enormous subsidies promoting alternatives to fossil fuel premised on the Net Zero Theory. The EPA Endangerment Finding, for example, asserts “elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated to endanger the public health and to endanger the public welfare of current and future generations.”

On April 9, 2025 President Trump issued a “Memorandum on Directing Repeal of Unlawful Rules” and Fact Sheet stating “agencies shall immediately take steps to effectuate the repeal of any [unlawful] regulation” under Supreme Court precedents, inter alia, where “the scientific and policy premises undergirding it had been shown to be wrong,” or “where the costs imposed are not justified by the public benefits.” We understand the Supreme Court has also ruled in the leading case State Farm that an agency regulation is arbitrary, capricious and thus invalid where, inter alia:

— “the agency has … entirely failed to consider an important aspect of the problem”

— “the agency has relied on factors which Congress has not intended it to consider.”

We are career physicists with a special expertise in radiation physics, which describes how CO₂ and GHGs affect heat flow in Earth’s atmosphere. In our scientific opinion, contrary to most media reporting and many people’s understanding, the “scientific premises undergirding” the Net Zero Theory, all the Biden Net Zero Theory rules and congressional subsidies are scientifically false and “wrong,” and violate these two State Farm mandates.

First, Scientific Evidence Ignored. All the agency rules, publications and studies we have seen supporting the Endangerment Finding and other Biden Net Zero Theory rules ignored, as if it does not exist, the robust and reliable scientific evidence that:

(a) carbon dioxide, GHGs and fossil fuels will not cause catastrophic global warming and more extreme weather, detailed in Part III.

(b) there will be disastrous consequences for the poor, people worldwide, future generations, Americans, America, and other countries if CO₂, other GHGs are reduced to Net Zero and fossil fuels eliminated that will endanger public health and welfare, detailed in Part IV.

Second, Unscientific Evidence at the Foundation. Unscientific evidence is all we have seen underlying the Endangerment Finding and all the other Biden Net Zero rules, detailed in Part V. Further, Pres. Trump’s Memorandum Fact Sheet stated that agencies “must repeal any regulation where the costs imposed are not justified by the public benefits.” This is a separate and an additional reason all the Biden Net Zero Theory rules must be repealed because they have no public benefits but impose enormous costs, detailed in Parts III-V.

Therefore, these Supreme Court decisions and the science demonstrated below support repealing all the Net Zero Theory rules as soon as possible. Further, for the same reasons, Congress should repeal all Net Zero theory subsidies, all laws that require GHG emissions be reduced and all laws that restrict fossil fuel development and infrastructure.

Finally, Peter Drucker warned, as every Net Zero Theory rule and subsidy demonstrates, that science in government is often based on “value judgments” that are “incompatible with any criteria one could possibly call scientific.”

Therefore, we suggest the President issue an Executive Order requiring all government agencies taking action based on scientific knowledge only rely on scientific knowledge derived by the scientific method, and never base their action on unscientific evidence and sources. We also suggest the Executive Order clarify that the scientific method is, simply and profoundly, to validate theoretical predictions with observations, and further, that scientific knowledge is never determined by the opinions of government, consensus, 97% of scientists, peer review, or is based on models that do not work, or cherry-picked, fabricated, falsified or omitted contradictory data, elaborated in Part II of the paper.

In summary, the blunt scientific reality requires urgent action because we are confronted with policies that destroy western economies, impoverish the working middle class, condemn billions of the world’s poorest to continued poverty and increased starvation, leave our children despairing over the alleged absence of a future, and will enrich the enemies of the West who are enjoying the spectacle of our suicide march.

Instead, let people and the market decide, not governments.

Scientific details follow.

Magna est veritas. Help it to prevail by reading the whole thing here.

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

Back To Normal

August 2, 2025 – 1:40 pm

Well, it’s August now, and as I write, my daughter, her husband (of whom we are very fond indeed; he’s a sterling chap), and our three grandsons (ages three, six, and just-turned-nine) are in an Airbus 350-1000 somewhere over Mongolia on their way back to their home in Hong Kong.

It was lovely to have them here — well worth the effect that three weeks of chaos can have on a pair of seventy-ish retirees and their usually tidy home — but now the lovely Nina and I, having blinked back the tears of parting’s sweet sorrow (in N’s case, wholly unsuccessfully), will be catching up on sleep, getting the house back in order, and returning to normal life, which in my case still includes occasional scribbling here at the blog.

Back soon. I hope you all are well.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

Ozzy Osbourne, 1948-2025

July 22, 2025 – 5:00 pm

As you’ve probably heard by now, Ozzy Osbourne has died. For anyone of my generation, that’s a biggie, and I’m sorry to hear he’s gone.

I had a slight personal connection: back in 1983, when I was just making the transition from assistant to staff engineer at Power Station Studios in New York, my boss Tony Bongiovi got a call from the record company saying that the release of Ozzy’s latest album, Bark At The Moon, was being held up because the mixes weren’t good enough, and that they wanted Tony to remix the album. (The cover art had already been finalized, so there wouldn’t be a mixing credit involved, but I’m sure they made it worth Tony’s while.) Tony drafted me to assist, and on the evening before we started, I remember the three of us going out to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant (La Torre di Pisa, on 9th Avenue, now defunct).

The mixes proceeded normally, until Tony suddenly caught a debilitating flu with two songs to go. He told me I’d have to do the mixes in his stead, and Ozzy had no objection, and so for those last two mixes I ended up in the pilot’s seat, at the old Neve 8068 console in Studio A. (If you’re interested, the songs are Slow Down and Waiting For Darkness.)

I never saw Ozzy again after that, but I remember him as a cheery and good-natured fellow, and pretty much exactly as he always came across in public. He had an enormous influence on the development of hard rock in all its later forms, and all who came after owe him a debt of gratitude.

Rest in peace, Ozzy, and thank you.

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

Full House!

July 13, 2025 – 3:24 pm

At the moment the lovely Nina and I have our daughter, her husband, and our three energetic grandsons (ages 3, 6, and nearly 9) visiting with us from Hong Kong, as well as our son and his fiancée. As you can imagine, under such circumstances the world’s goings-on have receded into the distance, as have the metaphysical enigmas that normally vex and harass a gentlemen of my advanced age and contemplative nature. So I might be updating the blog even less often in the next few weeks (though if the Muse grabs me by the ear I’ll certainly pop in).

My best wishes to you all as always!

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (3)

Nothing To See Here!

July 7, 2025 – 1:13 pm

Well, we have now been assured by the DOJ that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself, that he had no “client list”, and that there is no evidence that he ever blackmailed anybody.

As Sen. John Kennedy once said in a hearing: “Three things that don’t hang themselves: Christmas lights, drywall, and Epstein.”

What’s really special and heartwarming about all of this is that they’re so obviously lying to us because a great many immensely powerful people are threatened by the truth coming out; that everybody knows perfectly well they’re just lying; that they know we know they’re lying; that we know that they know that we know they’re lying; and that everybody knows they will just lie and lie and lie and that nothing at all will ever be done about it.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (7)

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